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tDITED BY 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 




Thomas Carl^le. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK 



SELECTIONS FROM 



THOMAS CARLYLE 



FOR EVERY DAY IN THE YEAR 



COMPILED AND EDITED BY 

ANN BACHELOR 



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Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, 
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, 
And marching single in an endless file, 
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. 
To each they offer gifts after his will, 
Bread, kingdom, stars, and sky that holds 

them all. 
I, in my pleached garden, watched the 

pomp, 
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily 
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day 
Turned and departed silent. I too late 
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn. 

—Ralph Waldo Emerson. 



January* 

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, 
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, 
And marching single in an endless file. 
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. 
To each they offer gifts after his will, 
Bread, kingdom, stars, and sky that holds 

them all. 
I, in my pleached garden, watched the 

pomp, 
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily 
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day 
Turned and departed silent. I too late 
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn. 

—Ralph Waldo Emerson. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



January i. 
So here hath been dawning 

Another blue Day ; 
Think, wilt thou let it 

Slip useless away ? 

Out of Eternity 

This new day is born ; 
Into Eternity 

At night shall return. 

Behold it aforetime 

No eyes ever did ; 
So soon it forever 

From all eyes is hid. 

Here hath been dawning 
Another blue Day ; 

Think, wilt thou let it 
Slip useless away ? 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



January 2. 
O Time ! Time ! how it brings forth and 
devours ! And the roaring flood of existence 
rushes on, forever similar, forever changing ! 



January 3. 
The curtains of Yesterday drop down, the 
curtains of To-morrow roll up; but Yester- 
day and To-morrow both are. 

January 4. 
Oh, it is great, and there is no other 
greatness, to make some work of God's 
creation more fruitful, better, more worthy 
of God ; to make some human heart a little 
wiser, manfuller, happier— more blessed, less 
accursed ! 



January 5. 
Have a purpose in life, and, having it, 
throw such strength of mind and muscle 
into your work as God has given you. 

January 6. 
The great man's sincerity is the kind he 
cannot speak of: nay, I suppose, he is con- 



8 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

scious rather of ^V/sincerity ; for what man 
can walk accurately by the law of truth for 
one day ? No, the great man does not 
boast himself sincere, far from that, perhaps 
does not ask himself if he is so : I would 
say rather, his sincerity does not depend 
on himself; he cannot help being sincere! 
The great fact of existence is great to him. 
Fly as he will, he cannot get out of the 
awful presence of this reality. His mind is 
so made ; he is great by that, first of all. 
Fearful and wonderful, real as life, real as 
death, is this universe to him. Though all 
men should forget its truth and walk in a 
vain show, he cannot. At all moments the 
flamc-imagc glares upon him, undeniable, 
there, there ! 



January 7. 
In all true works of Art wilt thou discern 
Eternity looking through time ; the God- 
like rendered visible. 



January 8. 
Habit is the deepest law of human nature. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



It is our supreme strength, if also, in cer- 
tain circumstances, our miserable weakness. 
Let me go once, scanning my way with any 
earnestness of outlook, and, successfully ar- 
riving, my footsteps are an invitation to me 
a second time to go by the same way ; — it 
is easier than any other way. Habit is our 
primal fundamental law, — habit and imita- 
tion, — there is nothing more perennial in 
us than these two. They are the source of 
all working and all apprenticeship, of all 
practical and all learning in the world. 



January 9. 
Not how much chaff is in you ; but 
whether you have any wheat. 



January 10. 
The healthy body is good, but the soul 
in right health is the thing beyond all others 
to be prayed for, the blessedcst thing this 
earth receives of heaven. 



January ii. 
It is a high, solemn, almost awful, thought 
for every individual man that his earthly 



lO CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

influence, \\hich has had a commencement, 
will never, through all ages, were he the 
very meanest of us, have an end. 



January 12. 
There needs not a great soul to make a 
hero ; there needs a God-created soul which 
will be true to its origin ; that will be a 
great soul. 



January 13. 
The strong man will find ivork, which 
means difficulty, pain, to the full measure of 
his strength. 



January 14. 
Thy life is no idle dream, but a solemn 
reality. It is thy own ; it is all thou hast 
to front Eternity with. 



January 15. 
God made the soul of man. He did not 
doom any soul of man to live as a Hy- 
pothesis and Hearsay, in a world filled with 
such, and the fatal work of such ! 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. ii 



January i6. 
The writer of a book, is not he a Preacher, 
preaching not to this parish or that, in this 
day or that, but to all men in all times and 
places ? 

January 17. 
Manhood begins when we have in any- 
way made truce with necessity ; but begins 
joyfully and hopefully only when we have 
reconciled ourselves to necessity, and felt 
that in necessity we are free. 



January 18. 
I SHOULD say sincerity, a deep, great, gen- 
uine sincerity, is the first characteristic of 
all men in any way heroic. 



January 19. 
Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or 
even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were 
it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of 
a product, produce it, in God's name ! 'Tis 
the utmost thou hast in thee: out with 



12 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

it, then. Up, up ! Whatsoever thy hand 
findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. 
Work while it is called To-day ; for the 
night Cometh, wherein no man can work. 



January 20. 
The meaning of life here on earth might 
be defined as consisting in this : To unfold 
your self, to work what thing you have the 
faculty for. 

January 21. 
May we not again say, that in the huge 
mass of evil, as it rolls and swells, there is 
ever some good working imprisoned ; work- 
ing toward deliverance and triumph ? 

January 22. 
Foolish men mistake transitory sem- 
blances for eternal fact, and go astray more 
and more. 

January 23. 
No nobler feeling than this, of admira- 
tion for one higher than himself, dwells in 
the breast of man ; — It is to this hour, and 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 13 



at all hours, the vivifying influence in 
man's life. 



January 24. 
Nothing ever happens but once in this 
v/orld. ■ What I do now I do once for all. 
It is over and gone, with all its eternity of 
solemn meaning. 

January 25. 
There is always hope in a man who 
actually and earnestly works. In idleness 
alone is there perpetual despair. 

January 26. 
Not one false man but does unaccount- 
able mischief. 



January 27. 

The tendency to persevere, to persist in 

spite of hindrances, discouragements, and 

impossibilities— it is this that in all things 

distinguishes the strong soul from the weak. 

January 28. 
I HAVE always found that the honest 



14 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



truth of our own mind has a certain at- 
traction for every other mind that loves 
truth honestly. 

January 29. 
Conviction, were it never so excellent, 
is worthless till it convert itself into conduct. 

January 30. 
Evil once manfully fronted ceases to "be 
evil, there is generous battle-hope in place 
of dead, passive misery ; the evil itself has 
become a kina of good. 

January 31. 
Blessed is he who has found his work; 
let him ask no other blessedness. 



Firm braced I sought my ancient woods, 

Struggling through the drifted roads ; 

The whited desert knew me not, 

Snow-ridges masked each darHng spot. 

Eldest mason, Frost, had piled 

Swift cathedral in the wild, 

The piney hosts were sheeted ghosts. 

— Ralph Waldo Emerson. 



15 



1 6 CARL VLB YEAR-BOOK. 



February i. 
Don't object that your duties are so in- 
significant ; they are to be reckoned of in- 
finite significance, and alone important to 
you. Were it but the more perfect regula- 
tion of your apartments, the sorting away 
of your clothes and trinkets, the arranging 
of your papers, — whatsoever thy hand 
findeth to do, do it with all thy might, and 
all thy worth and constancy. Much more if 
your duties are of evidently higher, wider 
scope ; if you have brothers, sisters, a father, 
a mother, weigh earnestly what claim does 
lie upon you, on behalf of each, and consider 
it, as the one thing needful to pay them 
more and more, honestly and nobly, what 
you owe. What matter how miserable one 
is if one can do that ; that is the sure and 
steady disconnection and extinction of what- 
ever miseries one has in this world. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



February 2. 
The eye of the intellect sees in all objects 
what it brought with it the means of seeing. 

February 3. 
Perhaps there is no other knowledge but 
that which is got by working ; the rest is 
yet all a hypothesis of knowledge ; a thing 
floating in the clouds, in endless logic-vor- 
tices, till we try to fix it. 

February 4. 
Beautiful it is to understand and know 
that a thought did never die; that, as thou, 
the originator thereof, hast gathered it and 
created it from the whole Past, so thou wilt 
transmit to the Avhole Future. It is thus 
that the heroic heart, the seeing eye of the 
first times, still feels and sees in us ot the 
latest : that the wise man stands ever encom- 
passed, and spiritually entranced by a cloud 
of witnesses and brothers, and there is a 
living literal communion of saints, wide as 
the world itself, and as the history of the 
world. 
2 



i8 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

February 5. 
From the lowest depths there is a path 
to the loftiest height ; and for the poor also 
a Gospel has been published. 



February 6. 
I don't like to talk much with people 
who always agree with me. It is amusing to 
coquette with an echo for a little while, but 
one soon tires of it. 



February 7. 
Silence is the element in which great 
things fashion themselves together; that at 
length they may emerge, full-formed and 
majestic, into the delight of life which they 
are henceforth to rule. 



February 8. 
Does like join like ? Does the spirit of 
method stir in that confusion, so that its em- 
broilment becomes order? Can the man 
say, fiat lux^ let there be light ; and out of 
chaos make a world ? Precisely as there is 
light in himself, will he accomplish this. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



FEBRUARY 9. 

If hero means sincere many why may not 
every one of us be a hero ? 

February 10. 
Cast forth thy act, thy word, into the 
ever-living, ever-working universe : it is a 
seed — given that cannot die; unnoticed to- 
day, it will be found flourishing as a banyan 
grove, perhaps, also, as a hemlock forest, 
after a thousand years. 



February ii. 
A MAN shall and must be valiant ; he must 
march forward and quit himself like a man 
— trusting imperturbably in the appointment 
and choice of the upper powers ; and, in the 
whole, not fear at all. Now and always, the 
completeness of his victory over fear will 
determine how much of a man he is. 



February 12. 
Make yourself an honest man, and then 
you may be sure there is one less rascal in 
the world. 



20 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

February 13. 
The man who cannot laugh is not only 
fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils, but 
his whole life is already a treason and a 
stratagem. 

February 14. 
Man's actions here are of infinite mo- 
ment to him, and never die or end at all. 
Man with his little life reaches upward high 
as heaven, — downward low as hell ; and in 
his three score years of time holds an eter- 
nity, fearfully and wonderfully hidden. 



February 15. 
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a 
man, but for one man who can stand pros- 
perity, there are a hundred that will stand 
adversity. 

February 16. 
The thing which is deepest-rooted in 
nature, what we call truest, that thing, and 
not the other, will be found growing at last. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK, 21 

February 17. 
Our thoughts, good or bad, are not in 
our command, but every one of us has at 
all hours duties to do ; and these we do 
negligently, like a slave, or faithfully, like a 
true servant. " Do the duty that is nearest 
thee " — that the first, and that well : all the 
rest will disclose themselves with increasing 
clearness, and make successive demand. 
Were your duties never so small, I advise 
you, set yourself with double and treble 
energy and punctuality, to do them., hour 
after hour, day after day. 



February 18. 
We are the miracle of miracles — the great 
inscrutable mystery of God. We cannot 
understand it, w^e know not how to speak 
of it ; but we may feel and know, if we like, 
that it is verily so. 



'February 19. 
Thou art not alone, if thou have Faith. 



22 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

February 20. 
Work is of a religious nature : — work is 
of a brave nature: which it is the aim of re- 
ligion all to be. All work of man is as the 
summers, a waste ocean threatens to devour 
him ; if he front it not bravely, it will keep 
its word. By incessant wise defiance of it, 
lusty rebuke and buffet of it, behold how it 
loyally supports him, bears him as its con- 
queror along. 



February 21. 
Men cannot live isolated ; we are all bound 
together, for mutual good or else for mutual 
misery, as living nerves in the same body. 



February 22. 

The true past departs not ; no truth or 

goodness realized by man ever dies, or can 

die, but all is still here, and, recognized or 

not, lives and works through endless changes. 



February 23. 
A WORD spoken in season, at the right mo- 
ment, is the matter of ages. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 23 



February 24. 
The weakest living creature, by concen- 
trating his powers on a single object, can 
accomplish something. The strongest, by 
his dispensing over many, may fail to ac- 
complish anything. The drop, by contmu- 
ally falling, bores its passage through the 
hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes 
over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no 
trace behind. 

Februarv 25. 
My friend, all speech and humor are short- 
lived, foolish, untrue. Genuine work done 
what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal ! 
Take courage, then; raise the arm, strike 
home, and that right lustily ; the citade of 
hope must yield to noble desire, thus 
seconded by effort. 

Februarv 26, 
Great souls are always loyally submis- 
sive, reverent to what is over them ; only 
small, mean souls are otherwise. 



24 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



February 27. 
This is such a serious world that we 
should never speak at all unless we had 
something to say. 

February 28. 
Over the times thou hast no power — to 
redeem a world sunk in dishonesty has not 
been given to thee. Solely over one man 
therein thou hast a quite absolute, uncon- 
trollable power. Him redeem and make 
honest. 



/Iftarcb^ 

Winters know 

Easily to shed the snow. 

And the untaught Spring is wise 

In cowslips and anemones. 

— Ralph Waldo Emerson. 



25 



26 CARL VLB YEAR-BOOK. 

March i. 
All visible things are emblems; what 
thou seest is not there on its own account ; 
strictly taken, is not there at all ; matter 
exists only spiritually, and to represent some 
idea, and body it forth. On the other hand, 
all emblematic things are properly Clothes, 
thought-woven or hand-woven. Whatsoever 
sensibly exists, whatsoever represents Spirit 
to Spirit, is properly a Clothing, a suit of 
Raiment, put on for a season, and to be laid 
off. Thus in this one pregnant subject of 
Clothes, rightly understood, is included all 
that men have thought, dreamed, done and 
been. The whole External Universe and 
what it holds is but Clothing ; and the es- 
sence of all Science lies in the Philosophy 
of Clothes. 



March 2. 
In Books lies the soul of the whole Past 
Time ; the articulate, audible voice of the 
Past, when the body and material substance 
of it has altogether vanished like a dream. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 27 

March 3. 
To the mean eye all things are trivial, as 
certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow. 



March 4. 
What a wretched thing is all fame ! A 
renown of the highest sort endures, say, for 
two thousand years, and then ? Why then, 
a fathomless eternity swallows it. Work for 
eternity ; not the meager rhetorical eternity 
of the periodical cities, but for the real 
eternity wherewith dwelleth the Divine. 



March 5. 
Rich as we are in biography, a well-written 
life is almost as rare as a well-spent one ; and 
there are certainly many more whose history 
deserves to be recorded than those able and 
willing to furnish the record. 



March 6. 
One of the Godlike things in this world 
is the veneration done to human worth by 
the hearts of men. 



28 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

March 7. 
Give us, O give us, the man who sings at 
his work! Be his occupation what it may, 
he is equal to any of those who follow the 
same pursuit in silent sullenness. He will 
do more in the same time — he will do it 
better — he will persevere longer. One is 
scarcely sensible of fatigue whilst he marches 
to music. The very stars are said to make 
harmony as they revolve in their sphere. 

March 8. 
Readers are not aware of the fact, but a 
fact it is of daily increasing magnitude, and 
already of terrible importance to readers, 
that their first grand necessity in reading 
is to be vigilantly, conscientiously select I 
And to know everywhere that books, like 
human souls, are actually divided into what 
we call "sheep and goats," — the latter put 
inexorably on the left hand of the Judge; 
and tending, every goat of them, at all mo- 
ments, wdiither we know, and much to be 
avoided, and if possible ignored, by all 
creatures. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 29 



March 9. 
Everywhere the human soul stands be- 
tween a hemisphere of light and another of 
darkness ; on the confines of two everlastino- 
hostile empires — Necessity and Free Will. 



March 10. 
Genuine work alone, what thou workest 
faithfully, that is eternal as the Almighty 
Founder and World-Builder Himself. 



March ii. 
He who has battled with poverty and 
hard toil will be found stronger and more 
expert than he who could stay at home from 
the battle, concealed among the provision 
wagons, or unwatchfully abiding by the stuff. 

March 12. 
Midas longed for gold. He got it, so that 
whatever he touched became gold, and he, 
with his long ears, was little the better for it. 



March 13. 
Fame is no sure test of merit, but only a 



3° 



CARLYLR YEAR-BOOK. 



probability of such ; it is an accident, not a 
property, of man. 

March 14. 
Learn to be good readers, which is per- 
haps a more difificult thing than you imagine. 
Learn to be discriminative in your reading; 
to read faithfully, and with your best at- 
tention, all kinds of things which you have 
a real interest in, — a real, not an imaginary, 
— and which you will find to be really fit 
for what you are engaged in. 

March 15. 
The nobleness of silence. The highest 
melody dwells in silence — the sphere mel- 
ody, the melody of health. 

March 16. 
Every noble work is at first impossible. 



March 17. 
A MAN with a half-volition goes backwards 
and forwards, and makes no way on the 
smoothest road ; a man with a whole vo- 
lition advances in the roughest, and will 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



31 



reach his purpose, if there be even a little 
wisdom in it. 



March 18. 
Only in a world of sincere men is unity 
possible — and there, in the long run, it is 
as good as certain. 



March 19. 
Let a man try faithfully, manfully, to be 
right, he will daily grow more and more rii^ht. 
It is at the bottom of the condition on which 
all men have to cultivate themselves. 



March 20. 
The true epic of our times is not " arms 
and the man," but "tools and the man," an 
infinitely wider kind of epic. 



March 21. 
Were he ever so benighted and forgetful 
of his high calling, there is always hope in 
a man who actually and earnestly works. 



32 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

INIaRCH 22. 

A LAUGH, to be joyous, must flow from a 
joyous heart, for without kindness there can 
be no true joy. 



March 23. 
A COUNTRY which has no national h'tera- 
ture, or a Hterature too insignificant to force 
its way abroad, must always be, to its neigh- 
bors at least, in every important spiritual re- 
spect, an unknown and unestimated country. 



March 24. 
Liberty ? The true liberty of a man, 
you would say, consists in his finding out, 
or being forced to find out, the right path, 
and to walk therein. To learn, or to be 
taught, what work he actually was able for; 
and then, by permission, to set about doing 
of the same ! Tiiat is his true blessedness, 
honor, '* liberty," and maximum of well- 
being : if liberty be not that, I for one have 
small care about liberty. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 33 



March 25. 
The right of private judgment will sub- 
sist, in full force, wherever true men subsist. 

March 26. 
Labor is discovered to be the grand con- 
queror, enriching and building up nations 
more surely than the proudest battles. 



March 27. 
A HERO is a hero at all points; in the 
soul and thought of him first of all. 



March 28. 
Are not all true men that live, or that 
ever lived, soldiers of the same army, en- 
listed under heaven's captaincy, to do battle 
against the same enemy, the empire of 
darkness and wronsr? 



March 29. 
Who will begin the long, steep journey 
with us ? Or is there none : no one that 
can dare? We will not think so. 
3 



34 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



March 30. 
Love not pleasure ; love God. This is 
the everlasting yea, wherein all contradic- 
tion is solved ; Avhcrein whoso walks and 
works, it is well with him. 



March 31. 

The history of the world is but the 
biography of great men. 

Of all acts, is not, for a man, repentance 
the most divine? 



HpdU 

April cold with dripping rain, 
Willows and lilacs bring again 
The whistle of returnino- birds 

o 

And trumpet lowing of the herds; 
The scarlet maple-keys betray 
What potent blood hath modest May. 
What fairy face the earth renews 
The wealth of fame, the flush of hues ; 
What joy in rosy waves outspread 
Flows from the heart of Love, the Lord. 
— Ralph Waldo Emerson. 



35 



36 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



April i. 
What great laboratory is this ? The hills 
stand snow-powdered, pale-bright. The 
black hailstorm awakens in them, rushes 
down like a black, swift ocean-tide, valley 
answering valley ; and again the sun blinks 
out ; and the poor sower is casting his grain 
into the furrow, hopeful he that the Zodiac 
and far Heavenly Horologues have not fal- 
tered ; and that there will be yet another 
summer added for us and another harvest. 
Our whole heart asks with Napoleon : 
'' Messieurs, who made all that ? Be silent, 
foolish Messieurs ! " 



Aprii. 2. 
There is a mystery about nature, take 
her as you will. The essence of poetry 
comes breathing to a mind that feels from 
every province of her empire. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK, 37 

ApriIv 3. 

Literature is the thought of thinking 
souls. 



Aprii. 4. 
True humor springs not more from the 
head than from the heart ; it is not con- 
tempt, its essence is love ; it issues not in 
laughter, but in smiles, which lie far deeper. 
It is a sort of immense sublimity exalting, 
as it were, into our affections, what is below 
us, while sublimity draws down into our af- 
fections what is above us. 



Aprii. 5. 
Cant is itself properly a double-distilled 
lie, the materia prima of the devil, from 
which all falsehoods, imbecilities, and abom- 
inations body themselves, and from which 
no true thing can come. 



Aprii. 6. 
To-day is not yesterday. We ourselves 
change. How, then, can our works and 
thoughts, if they are always to be the fit- 



38 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

test, continue always the same ? Change, 
indeed, is painful, yet ever needful ; and if 
memory have its force and worth, so also 
has hope. 

Aprii, 7 

THE BOOK OF jv._.. 

I CALL that, apart from all theories about 
it, one of the grandest things ever written 
with pen. One feels, indeed, as if it were 
not Hebrew; such a noble universality, dif- 
ferent from noble patriotism or sectarianism, 
reigns in it. A noble Book ; all men's Book ! 
It is our first, oldest statement of the never- 
ending Problem, — man's destiny and God's 
ways with him here in this earth. And all 
in such free-flowing outlines ; grand in its 
sincerity, in its simplicity, in its epic melody, 
and repose of reconcilement. There is the 
seeing eye, the mildly understanding heart, 
So true every way ; true eyesight and vision 
for all things ; material things no less than 
spiritual. The Horse, — '* hast thou clothed 
his neck with thunder ? " — " he laughs at 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 39 



the shaking of the spear!" Such Uving 
likenesses were never since drawn. Sub- 
lime sorrow, sublime reconciliation ; oldest 
choral melody as of the heart of mankind ; 
so soft, and great— as the summer midnight ; 
as the world with its seas and stars ! There 
is nothing written, I think, in the Bible or 
out of it, of equal literary merit. 

April 8. 
Is not God's Universe a symbol of the 
Godlike; is not Immensity a Temple; is 
not Man History and Men's History a per- 
petual Evangel? Listen, and for Organ- 
music thou wilt ever, as of old, hear the 
Morning Stars sing together. 

APRIIy 9. 

It is not to taste sweet things, but to do 
noble and true things, and vindicate him- 
self under God's heaven as a God-made man, 
that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. 
Show him the way of doing that, and the 
dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero. 
They wrong man greatly who say he is to be 



40 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

reduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, 
martyrdom, death, are the allurements that 
act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner 
genial life of man, you have a flame that 
burns up all lower considerations. Not hap- 
piness, but something higher ; one sees this 
even in the finless classes, with their *' point 
of honor," and the like. Not by flattering 
our appetites. No ; by awakening the heroic 
that slumbers in every heart, can any re- 
ligion gain followers. 

April io. 
One life ; a little gleam of time between 
two eternities ; no second chance for us for- 
ever more. 



APRIIv 12. 

One monster there is in this world — the 
idle man. 



Aprii. 13. 
Look up, and behold the eternal fields of 
light that lie round about the throne of God. 
Had no star ever appeared in the heavens, 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 41 



to man there would have been no heavens, 
and he would have laid himself down to his 
last sleep in a spirit of anguish, as upon a 
gloomy earth vaulted over by a material 
arch— solid and impervious. 

Aprii. 14- 
Reform, like charity, must begin at home. 
Once well at home, how it will radiate out- 
wards, irrepressible, into all that we touch 
and handle, speak and work ; kindling ever 
new light by incalculable contagion, spread- 
ing, in geometric ratio, far and wide, doing 
good only wherever it spreads, and not evil. 

Aprii< 15. 
• Oh, give us the man who sings at his work ! 



April 16. 
We cannot look, however imperfectly, 
upon a great man without gaining some- 
thing by him. He is the living-light foun- 
tain, which it is good and pleasant to be 
near. The light which enlightens, which 
has enlightened the darkness of the world ; 



42 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

and this not as a kindled lamp only, but 
rather as a natural luminary shining by the 
gift of heaven ; a flowing-light fountain, as I 
say, of native original insight, of manhood 
and heroic nobleness — in whose radiance all 
souls feel that it is well with them. 



ApriIv 17. 
In every epoch of the world, the great 
event, parent of all others, is it not the ar- 
rival of a thinker in the world ? 



April 18. 
Worship is transcendent wonder; wonder 
for which there is now no limit or measure ; 
that is worship. 



Aprii. 19. 
No iron chain, or outward force of any 
kind, could compel the soul of a man to 
believe or to disbelieve : it is his own inde- 
feasible light, that judgment of his; he will 
reign and believe there, by the grace of God 
alone ! 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



43 



Aprii, 20. 
Custom doth make dotards of us all. 



Aprii. 21. 
A STAR is beautiful, it affords pleasure, 
not from what it is to do, or to give, but 
simply by being what it is. It befits the 
heavens ; it has congruity with the mighty 
space in which it dwells. It has repose : 
no force disturbs its eternal peace. It has 
freedom : no obstruction lies between it and 
infinity. 



Aprii, 22. 
Wondrous is the strength of cheerful- 
ness, altogether past calculation its power of 
endurance. Effects, to be permanently use- 
ful, must be uniformly joyous — a spirit all 
sunshine — graceful from very gladness— 
beautiful because bright. 



Aprii, 23. 
Many volumes have been written byway 
of commentary on Dante and his Book ; 
yet, on the whole, with no great result. . . . 



44 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

After all commentaries, the Book itself is 
mainly what we know of him. The Book, 
and, I might add, that portrait commonly 
attributed to Giotto, which, looking on it, 
you cannot help inclining to think genuine, 
whoever did it. To me, it is a most touch- 
ing face, perhaps of all faces that I know, the 
most so. Lonely there, painted as on va- 
cancy, with the simple laurel wound round 
it ; deathless sorrow and pain, the known 
victory which is also deathless — significant 
of the whole history of Dante ! I think 
it is the mournfulcst face that ever was 
painted from reality, an altogether tragic, 
heart-affecting face. There is in it, as foun- 
dation of it, the softness, tenderness, gentle 
affection as of a child, but all this is as if con- 
gealed into sharp contradiction, into abne- 
gation, isolation, proud, hopeless pain. A 
soft, ethereal soul, looking out so stern, im- 
placable, grim, trenchant as from imprison- 
ment of thick-ribbed ice ! Withal, it is a si- 
lent pain, too ; a silent, scornful one : the lip 
is curled in a kind of godlike disdain of the 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK, 45 

thing that is eating out his heart, — as if it 
were, withal, a mean, insignificant thing, as 
if he whom it had power to torture and 
strangle were greater than it. The face of 
one wholly in protest, and life-long, unsur- 
rendering battle against the world. Affec- 
tion all converted into indignation — an im- 
placable indignation, slow, equable, silent, 
like that of a god ! The eye, too, it looks — 
out as in a kind of surprise, a kind of inquiry, 
why the world was of such a sort ? This is 
Dante ; so he looks, this *' voice of ten silent 
centuries," and sings us '' his mystic, un- 
fathomable song." 



Aprii, 24. 
The merit of originality is not novelty, 
it is sincerity. The believing man is the 
original man ; whatsoever he believes, he 
believes for himself, not for another. 



ApriIv 25. 
Prayer is the aspiration of our poor strug- 
gling, heavy-laden soul towards its Eternal 
Father, and, with or without words, ought 



46 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

not to become impossible, nor, I persuade 
myself, need it ever. Loyal sons and sub- 
jects can approach the King's throne, who 
have no requests to make there, except 
that they may continue loyal. 



Aprii. 26. 
Popularity is a blaze of illumination, or, 
alas ! of conflagration kindled round a man, 
showing what is in him ; often abstracting 
much from him, conflagrating the poor man 
himself into ashes and caput morturum. 



Aprii. 27. 
Democracy will itself accomplish the 
salutary universal change from the delusive 
to the real, and make a new blessed world of 
us by-and-by. 

ApriIv 28. 
Men do less than they ought unless they 
do all that they can. 



Aprii, 29. 
A DANDY is a clothes-wearing man, — a 



CARLYLE YEAR'BOOK. 



47 



man whose trade, office and existence con- 
sist in the wearing of clothes, — every faculty 
of his soul, spirit, person, and purse is heroic- 
ally consecrated to this one object — the wear- 
ing of clothes wisely and well ; so that, as 
others dress to live, he lives to dress. 



• Aprii, 30. 
Wondrous indeed is the virtue of a true 
Book. Not like a dead city of stones, yearly 
crumbling, yearly needing repair ; more like 
a tilled field, but then a spiritual field : 
like a spiritual tree, let me rather say, it 
stands from year to year, and from age to 
age (we have Books that already number 
some hundred and fifty human ages) ; and 
yearly comes its new produce of leaves (Com- 
mentaries, Deductions, Philosophical, Politi- 
cal System ; or were it only Sermons, Pam- 
phlets, Journalistic Essays), every one of 
which is talismanic and thaumaturgic, for it 
can persuade men. 



Onward and nearer rides the sun of May ; 
And wide around, tlie marriage of the plants 
Is sweetly solemnized. Then flows amain 
The surge of Summer's beauty ; dell and 

crag, 
Hollow and lake, hill-side and pine arcade, 
Are touched with genius. Yonder ragged 

cliff 
Has thousand faces in a thousand hours. 
— Ralph Waldo Emerson. 



48 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



49 



May I. 

Nature's laws are eternal ; her small still 
voice, speaking from the inmost heart of us, 
shall not, under terrible penalties, be disre- 
garded. 



May 2. 
A MUSICAL thought is one spoken by a 
mind that has penetrated into the inmost 
heart of the thing ; detected the inmost 
mystery of it, namely, the melody that lies 
hidden in it, the inward harmony of cohe- 
rence which is its soul, whereby it exists and 
has a right to be, here in this world. All 
inmost things, we may say, are melodious, 
naturally utter themselves in song. The 
meaning of song goes deep. Who is there 
that, in logical words, can express the effect 
music has on us? A kind of inarticulate 
unfathomable speech, which leads us to the 
edge of the infinite and lets us for moments 
gaze into that ! 
4 



50 CAKLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

May 3, 
Do the duty that is nearest thee. Thy sec- 
ond duty^vill already have become cleaicr. 



May 4. 
Awake, arise ! Speak forth what is in 
thee, what God has given thee, what tlie 
devil shall not take away. Hi<^her task 
than that of Priesthood was allotted to no 
man ; wert thou but the meanest in that 
sacred Hierarchy, is it not honor enough 
therein to spend and be spent ? 



( 



]Mav 5. 
You cannot make an association out of 
insincere men ; you cannot build an edifice 
except by plummet and level — at right 



angles to one another. 



May 6. 
In the commonest human face there lies 
more than Raphael will take away with him. 



May 7. 
We may pause in sorrow and silence over 
the depths of darkness that are in man, if 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



we rejoice in the heights of purer vision he 
has attained to. Such things were and are 
in man ; in all men, in us too. 



May 8. 
You remember that fancy of Plato's, of a 
man who had grown to maturity in some 
dark distance, and was brought on a sudden 
into the upper air to see the sun rise. What 
would his wonder be, and his rapt astonish- 
ment, at the sight we daily witness with in- 
difference ! 



May 9. 
Experience takes dreadfully high school- 
wages, but he teaches like no other. 



May 10. 
Every poet, be his outward lot what it 
may, finds himself born in the midst of 
force; he has to struggle from the littleness 
and obstruction of an Actual world into the 
freedom and infinitude of an Ideal. 



52 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

May II. 
Eternity looks grander and kinder if 
time grows meaner and more hostile. 



May 12. 
Prayer is and remains always a native 
and deepest impulse of the soul of man. . . 
No prayer, no religion ; or at least only a 
dumb and lamed one. Prayer is a turning 
of one's soul, in heroic reverence, in infinite 
desire and endeavor, towards the Highest, 
the All Excellent, Omnipotent, Supreme. 



May 13. 
Generations are as the days of toilsome 
mankind ; death and truth are the vesper 
and the matin bells that summon mankind 
to rise refreshed for new advancement. What 
the father has made, the son can make and 
enjoy ; but has also work of his own offered 
him. Thus all things wax and roll onwards ; 
arts, establishments, opinions, nothing is 
ever completed, but ever completing. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 53 

May 14. 

Sincerity, I think, is better than grace. 



May 15. 
In a vah'ant suffering for others, not in a 
slothful making others suffer for us, did 
nobleness ever lie. The chief of men is he 
who stands in the van of war, fronting the 
peril which frightens back all others, which, 
if it be not vanquished, will devour the 
others. Every noble crown is, and on earth 
will forever be, a crown of thorns. 



May 16. 
Poetry is but another form of wisdom, 
of religion ; is itself wisdom and religion. 



May 17. 
A GREAT soul, any sincere soul knows not 
what he is— alternates between the highest 
heights and the lowest depths ; can, of all 
things, the least measure — himself ! 



May 18. 
In the true literary man there is thus 
ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a 



54 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK, 

sacredness ; he is the light of the world ; 
the world's priest, — guiding it, like a sacred 
pillar of fire, in its dark pilgrimage through 
the waste of time. 



May 19. 
Great is self-denial ! . . . Life goes all 
to ravels and tatters where that is not. 



May 20. 
All that a man docs is physiognomical 
of him. You may see how a man would 
fight by the way in which he sings; his 
courage or want of courage is visible in the 
word he utters, in the opinion he has formed, 
no less than in the stroke he strikes. He 
one is and preaches the same self abroad 
in all those ways. 



May 21. 
It is a calumny on men to say that they 
are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of 
pleasure, recompense — sugar-plums of any 
kind, in this world or the next ! In the 
meanest mortal there lies something nobler. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 55 

May 22. 
Thought works in silence ; so does virtue. 
One might erect statues to silence. 



May 23. 
A LIE should be trampled on and extin- 
guished whenever found : I am for fumigat- 
ing the atmosphere when I suspect that false- 
hood, like a pestilence, breathes around me. 



May 24. 
It seems to me a great truth, that human 
things cannot stand on selfishness, mechani- 
cal utilities, economies, and law courts ; that 
if there be not a religious element in the 
relations of men, such relations are miserable 
and doomed to ruin. 



May 25. 
Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it 
has many points in common therewith. I 
call it rather a discerning of the infinite in 
the finite, — of the ideal made real. 



56 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

May 26. 
How does the poet speak to men with 
power but by being still more of a man than 
they ? 

May 27. 
Our good business in life is not to see 
what lies dimly at a distance, but to do 
what lies clearly at hand. 



May 2S. 
Nature is the time-vesture of Grd that 
reveals Him to the wise and hides Him from 
the foolish. 



May 29. 
SHAKESrEARE says we are creatures that 
look before and after; the more surprising, 
that we do not look around a little and see 
what is passing under our very eyes. 



May 30. 
Popular opinion is the greatest lie in 
the world. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 57 



May 31. 
There is no life of a man, faithfully re- 
corded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, 
rhymed or unrhymed. 



June. 

Let me go where'er I will, 
I hear a sky-born music still. 
It is not only in the rose, 
It is not only in the bird. 
But in the darkest, meanest things 
There always, always something sings. 
— Ralph Waldo EiMERson. 



58 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 59 



June I. 
What is nature? Art thou not the 
'' Living Garment " of God? O Heavens, 
is it, in very deed, He that ever speaks 
through thee ; that lives and loves in thee, 
that lives and hopes in me ? Sweeter than 
dayspring to the shipwrecked in Nova Zem- 
bla ; ah ! like the mother's voice to her little 
child that strays bewildered, Aveeping in 
unknown tumults : like soft streamings of 
celestial music to my too-exasperated heart, 
came the Evangel. The Universe is not 
dead and demoniacal, or charnel-house with 
specters, but godlike and my Father's ! 



June 2. 
It is ever my thought that the most God- 
fearing man should be the most blithe man. 



June 3. 
Mystical, more than magical, is that 
communing of soul with soul, both looking 



6o CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

heavenward. Here properly soul first speaks 
with soul ; for in looking heavenward, take 
it in what sense you may, not in looking 
earthward, does what we call union, love, 
society, begin to be possible. 

June 4- 
Is the white Tomb of our Loved One, 
who died from our arm, and had to be left 
behind us there, which rises in the distance 
like a pale, mournfully receding milestone, 
to tell how many toilsome, unchcered miles 
we have journeyed on alone, but a pale, 
spectral illusion? Is the lost Friend still 
mysteriously here, even as we are here mys- 
teriously with God? Know of a truth that 
only the Time-shadows have perished, or are 
perishable ; that the real Being of whatever 
was, and whatever is, and whatever will be, 
is even now and forever. 



June 5. 
The seeing eye ! It is this that discloses 
the inner harmony of things ; what nature 
meant, what musical idea nature has wrapped 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 6i 



up in these often rough embodiments. 
Something she did mean. To the seeing 
eye that something were discernible. 



June 6. 
It is a most earnest thing to be ahve in 
this world. 



Junk 7. 
To shape the whole Future is not our prob- 
lem ; but only to shape faithfully a small 
part of it, according to rules already known. 
It is perhaps possible for each of us, who will 
with due earnestness inquire, to ascertain 
clearly what he, for his own part, ought to 
do ; this let him, with true heart, do, and 
continue doing. The general issue will, as 
it has always done, rest well, with a higher 
intelligence than ours. . . . This day thou 
knowest ten thousand duties, seest in thy 
mind ten things which should be done for 
one that thou doest ! Do one of these ; this 
of itself will show thee ten others which can 
and shall be done. 



62 CAKLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

June 8. 
The great law of culture, let each become 
all that he was created capable of being : ex- 
pand, if possible, to his full growth ; resisting 
all impediments casting off all foreign, especi- 
ally all noxious, adhesions, and show himself 
at length in his own shape and stature, be 
these what they may. 



June 9. 
Action hangs, as it were, "dissolved" 
in speech, in thoughts whereof speech is the 
shadow, and precipitates itself therefrom. 
The kind of speech in a man betokens the 
kind of action you will get from him. 



June 10. 
My books are friends that never fail me. 



June II. 

Laws written, if not on stone tables, yet 

on the azure of infinitude, in the inner 

heart of God's creation, certain as life, certain 

as death ; I say the laws are there, and thou 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 63 

shalt not disobey them. It were better for 
thee not. Better a hundred deaths than yea ! 
Terrible " penalties," if thou wilt still need 
penalties, are there for disobeying. 



Junk 12. 
The man is the spirit he worketh in : 
not what he did, but what he became. 



Junk 13. 
Know that " impossible," where truth 
and mercy and the everlasting voice of na- 
ture order, has no place in the brave man's 
dictionary. That when all men have said 
'^ impossible," and tumbled noiselessly else- 
whither, and thou alone art left, then first 
thy time and possibility have come. It is 
for thee now ; do thou that, and ask no 
man's counsel but thy own only and God's. 



Junk 14. 
All inmost things, we may say', are melo- 
dious ; naturally utter themselves in song. 
The meaning of song goes deep. Poetry, 



64 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

therefore, we call musical thought. See 
deep enough, and you see musically. The 
heart of Nature being everywhere music, if 
you can only reach it. 



June 15. 
The believing man is the sincere man ; 
whatsoever he believes, he believes for him- 
self, not for another. Every son of Adam 
can become a sincere man, an original man, 
in this sense ; no mortal is doomed to bean 
insincere man. Whole ages, what we call 
ages of faith, are original ; all men in them, 
or the most of men in them, sincere. These 
are the great and fruitful ages : every worker, 
in all spheres, is a worker not on semblance, 
but on substance ; every work issues in a 
result ; the general sum of such work is 
great ; for all of it, as genuine, tends towards 
one goal ; all of it is additive, none of it is 
subtractive. There is true union, true kin- 
ship, loyalty, all true and blessed things, so 
far as the poor earth can produce blessed- 
ness for man. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 65 



Junk 16. 
In the whole world I had one complete 
approver; in that, as in other cases, one, and 
it was worth all. 

June 17. 
The thing that is uttered from the in- 
most part of a man's soul, differs altogether 
from what is uttered by the outer part. The 
outer is of the day, under the empire of 
mode ; the outer passes away, in swift end- 
less changes ; the inmost is the same yester- 
day, to-day, and forever. 



Junk 18. 
Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes 
of his greatness, it is because there is an in- 
finite in him, which, with all his cunning, he 
cannot quite bury under the finite. 



Junk 19. 
A POET, without love, were a physical 
metaphysical impossibility. 
5 



66 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

June 20. 
We are firm believers in the maxim that 
for all right judgment of any man or thing, 
it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good 
qualities before pronouncing on his bad. 

June 21. 
There is in man a higher than a love of 
happiness ; he can do without happiness, 
and instead thereof find blessedness. Was 
it not to preach forth this same Higher 
that sages and martyrs, the poet and priest, 
in all times have spoken and suffered, bear- 
ing testimony, through strife and through 
death, of the Godlike that is in man, and 
how in the Godlike only has he strength and 
freedom ? 



June 22. 
All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble 
work is alone noble. 



June 23. 
The man whom nature has appointed 
to do great things is, first of all, furnished 
with that openness to Nature which renders 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK, 67 

him incapable of being insincere. He is 
under the noble necessity of being true. 



Junk 24. 

What art of legislature was there that 

thou shouldst be happy ? What if thou wert 

born predestined not to be happy, but to be 

unhappy ! Close thy Koran, open thy Goethe. 



juNii 25. 
Love is the beginning of knowledge. 



June 26. 
Find a man vv-hose words paint you a like- 
ness, you have found a man with something. 



June 27. 
Society everywhere is some reproduction, 
not ///supportably inaccurate, of a graduated 
worship of heroes — reverence and obedience 
done to men really great and wise. 



June 28. 
For a genuine man it is no evil to be 
poor ; there ought to be Literary Men poor, 
to show whether they are genuine or not ! 



6S CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

June 29. 
We do not now call our great men gods 
nor admire witJioiit limit : ah, no, witJi limit 
enough! But if we have no great men, or 
do not admire at all, — that were a still worse 
case. 



June 30. 

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to 
be conscious of none. 

Great men are the fire-pillars in the dark 
pilgrimage of mankind ; they stand as 
heavenly signs, ever-living witnesses of what 
has been, prophetic tokens of what may still 
be. 



On bravely through the sunshine and the 

showers ! 
Time has his work to do and we have ours. 
— Ralph Waldo Emerson. 



69 



70 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



JUI.Y I. 

The course of Nature's phases in this our 
little fraction of a Planet, is partially known 
to us, but who knows what deeper courses 
these depend upon ; what infinitely larger 
Cycle of causes our little Epicycle revolves 
on ? To the Minnow every cranny and peb- 
ble, and quality and accident, of its little 
native brook may have become familiar ; but 
does the Minnow understand the Ocean 
Tides, and periodic Currents, the Trade- 
winds, and Monsoons, and Moon's Eclipses? 
By all which the condition which its little 
Creek is regulated, and may from time to 
time (unmiraculously enough) be quite over- 
set and reversed ? Such a minnow is Man, 
his Creek this planet Earth, his ocean the 
immeasurable All, his Monsoons and peri- 
odic Currents the mysterious Course of 
Providence through ^ons of ^ons. 



JUI^Y 2. 

The modern-majesty consists in work. 
What a man can do is his greatest orna- 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 71 



ment, and he always consults his dignity by 
doing it. 

JUI.Y 3. 

The true university of these days is a col- 
lection of books. 



July 4- 
The fatal man, is he not always the tui- 
thinking man, the man who cannot think 
and see ; but only grope and i?iis?>QQ the na- 
ture of the thing he works with? He mis- 
sees it, ////stakes it, as we say ; takes it for 
one thing, and it is another thing, and leaves 
him standing like a Futility there ! 

JUI.Y 5. 

Religion cannot pass away. Be not dis- 
turbed by infidelity. Religion cannot pass 
away. The burning of a little straw may 
hide the stars, but the stars are there and 
will reappear. 

JUIvY 6. 

A TRUE man believes with his whole judg- 
ment, with all the illumination and discern- 



72 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

ment that is in him, and has always so be- 
Heved. 



July 7. 
David's life and history, as written for us 
in those Psahns of his, I consider to be the 
truest emblem ever given of a man's moral 
progress and warfare here below\ All earnest 
souls will ever discern in it the faithful strug- 
gle of an earnest human soul towards what 
is good and best. Struggle often baffled, 
sore baffled, dow^n as into entire wreck ; yet 
a struggle never ended ; ever, with tears, 
repentance, true unconquerable purpose, 
begun anew. Poor human nature ! Is not 
a man's walking, in truth, always that : '* a 
succession of falls? " Man can do no other. 
In this wild element of a Life he has to 
struggle onw^ards ; now fallen, deep-abased ; 
and ever, with tears, repentance, with bleed- 
ing heart, he has to rise again, struggle 
still onwards. That his struggle be a faith- 
ful, unconquerable one : that is the question 
of questions. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 73 



JUI.Y 8. 

The essence of our being, the mystery in 
us that calls itself '' I,"— ah, what words have 
we for such things ? — is a breath of heaven ; 
the Highest Being reveals himself in man. 

July 9. 
It is in and through Symbols that man, 
consciously or unconsciously, lives, works, 
and has his being : those ages, moreover, are 
accounted the noblest vv'hich can the best 
recognize symbolical worth, and prize it the 
highest. For is not a symbol ever, to him 
who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer 
revelation of the Godlike ? 



JUIvY 10. 

The generality of men have no sinceriiy 
in their speech, no sense or profit in it. 
You are better listening to the inarticulate 
winds, regulating, if possible, the dog-kennel 
of your own heart. 

JUI.Y II. 

How one is vexed with little things in 



74 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



this life ! The great evils one triumphs over 
bravely, but the little eat away one's heart. 



JUIvY 12. 

Alas ! how all the faults and little in- 
firmities of the departed seem what they 
really were, mere virtues imprisoned, obstruc- 
ted in the strange, sensitive, tremulous ele- 
ment they were sent to live in ! 



July 13. 
All, does not every true man feel he is 
himself made higher by doing reverence to 
what is really above him ? No nobler or 
more blessed feeling dwells in a man's heart. 
And to me it is very cheering to consider 
that no skeptical logic, or general triviality, 
insincerity and aridity of any Time and its 
influences can destroy this noble inborn 
loyalty and worship that is in man. 



July 14. 
In fact, these old Norse songs have a 
truth in them, an inward perennial truth and 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 75 



greatness,— as, indeed, all must have that 
can very long preserve itself by tradition 
alone. It is a greatness not of mere body 
and gigantic bulk, but a rude greatness of 
soul. There is a sublime uncomplaining 
melancholy traceable in these old hearts. A 
great free glance into the very deeps of 
thought. They seem to have seen, these 
brave old Northmen, what Meditation has 
taught all men in all ages, that this world 
is after all but a show,— a phenomenon or 
appearance, no real thing. All deep souls 
see into that,— the Hindoo Mythologist, the 
German Philosopher,— the Shakespeare, the 
earnest Thinker, wherever he may be : *' We 
are such stuff as Dreams are made of ! " 

July 15. 
A MAN must conform himself to Nature's 
laws, be verily in communion with Nature 
and tlie truths of things, or Nature will an- 
swer him, no, not at all ! 

July 16. 
Islam means in its way Denial of Self, am 



76 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

nihilation of Self. This is yet the highest 
wisdom that Heaven has revealed to our 
earth. 



JUI.Y 17. 
Whenever you find a sentence musi- 
cally worded, of true rhythm and melody in 
the words, there is something deep and good 
in the meaning too. For body and soul, 
word and idea, go strangely together here 
as everywhere. 

JUIvY 18. 

I GIVE Dante my highest praise when I 
say of his Divine Comedy that it is, in all 
senses, genuinely a Song. In the very sound 
of it there is a canto fcrino ; it proceeds as 
by a chant. The language, his simple tcrza 
riiiia, doubtless, helped him in this. One 
reads along naturally with a sort of lilt. 
But I add, that it could not be otherwise; 
for the essence and material of the work are 
themselves rhythmic. Its depth, and rapt 
passion and sincerity, make it musical ; — go 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 77 



deep enough, there is music everywhere. A 
true inward symmetry, what one calls an 
architectural harmony, reigns in it, pro- 
portionates it all : architectural ; which also 
partakes of the character of music. The 
three kingdoms, Inferno, Purgatorio, Para- 
dise, look out on one another like com- 
partments of a great edifice ; a great super- 
natural world-cathedral, piled up there, stern, 
solemn, awful ; Dante's World of Souls ; it 
is, at the bottom, the sincerest of all Poems ; 
sincerity here, too, we find to be the measure 
of worth. It came deep out of the author's 
heart of hearts ; and it goes deep, and 
through long generations, into ours. 



JUI.Y 19. 
How far Ideals can be introduced into 
Practice, and at what point our impatience 
with their non-introduction ought to begin, 
is always a question. I think we may say 
safely, Let them introduce themselves as far 
as they can contrive to do it ! If they are 
the true faith of men, all men ought to be 



78 CARLYLR YEAR-BOOK, 



more or less impatient where they are not 
found introduced. 



July 20. 
There are genuine men of letters, and 
not genuine; as in every kind there is a 
genuine and a spurious. If Hero be taken 
to mean genuine, then I say the Hero as 
Man of Letters will be found discharging a 
function for us which is ever honorable, ever 
the hif^^hest. 



July 21. 
That man, in some sense or other, wor- 
ships Heroes ; that we all of us reverence 
and must ever reverence great men ; this 
is, to me, the living rock amid all rushings- 
down whatsoever — the one fixed point in 
modern revolutionary history, otherwise 
bottomless and shoreless. 



July 22. 
The degree of vision that dwells in a man 
is a correct measure of a man. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOO A'. 79 

July 23. 
There is an irrepressible tendency in 
every man to develop himself according to 
the magnitude which Nature has made him 
of; to speak out, to act out, what Nature 
has laid in him. 



July 24. 
Curious, I say, and not sufificiently consid- 
ered : how everything does co-operate with 
all ; not a leaf rotting on the highway but is 
an indissoluble portion of solar and stellar 
systems ; no thought, word or act of man 
but has sprung withal out of all men, and 
works sooner or later, recognizably or ir- 
recognizably, on all men ! It is all a Tree : 
circulation of sap and influence, mutual com- 
munication of every minutest leaf with the 
lowest talon of a root, with every other 
greatest and minutest portion of the whole. 



July 25. 
I WILL call this Luther a true Great Man ; 
great in intellect, in courage, affection and 



8o CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

integrity ; one of our most lovable and 
precious men. Great, not as a liewn obelisk ; 
but as an Alpine mountain, — so simple, hon- 
est, spontaneous, not setting-up to be great 
at all ; there for quite another purpose than 
being great ! Ah yes, unsubduable granite, 
piercing far and wide into the Heavens ; yet 
in the clefts of it fountains, green beautiful 
valleys with flowers ! A right Spiritual Hero 
and Prophet ; once more, a true Son of Na- 
ture and Fact, for whom these centuries, and 
many that are to come yet, will be thankful 
to Heaven. 



JUI,Y 26. 

On the whole, a man must not complain 
of his '* element," of his *' time," or the like ; 
it is thriftless work doing so. His time is 
bad ; well, then, he is there to make it better. 



JUI.Y 27. 
There is no act more moral between 
men than that of rule and obedience. Woe 
to him that claims obedience when it is not 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 8i 



due; woe to him that refuses it when it is! 
God's law is in that, I say, however the 
Parchment-laws may run : there is a Divine 
Right or else a Diabolic Wrong at the heart 
of every claim that one makes upon another. 

jui<Y 28. 
All true work of a man, hang the author 
of it on what gibbet you like, must and 
will accomplish itself. 

JUI.Y 29. 
Truly it is a sad thing for a people, as 
for a man, to fall into Skepticism, into 
dilettanteism, insincerity; not to know a 
Sincerity when they see it. For this world, 
and for all worlds, what curse is so fatal ? 



juivY 30. 
He who wears his heart on his sleeve will 
often have to lament that daws peck at it. 

JUI.Y 31. 
Perfect ignorance is quiet, perfect knowl- 
edge is quiet— not so the transition from the 
former to the latter. 
6 



Huoust 

Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know 
What rainbows teach, and sunsets show? 

— Ralph Waldo Emerson. 



82 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 83 



August i. 
Religion, Poetry is not dead; it will 
never die. Its dwelling and birthplace is in 
the soul of man, and it is eternal as the 
being of man. In any point of Space, in 
any section of Time, let there be a living 
Man ; and there is an Infinitude above him 
and beneath him, and an Eternity encom- 
passes him on this hand and on that ; and 
tones of Sphere-music, and tidings from 
loftier worlds, will flit round him, if he can 
but listen, and visit him with holy influences, 
even in the thickest press of trivialities, or 
the din of busiest life. Happy the man, 
happy the nation, that can hear these tid- 
ings ; that has them written in fit characters, 
legible to every eye, and the solemn import of 
them present at all moments to every heart ! 

August 2. 
The first condition of success, that, in 
striving honestly ourselves, we honestly ac- 



84 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

knowledge the striving of our neighbor ; that, 
with a Will unwearied in seeking Truth, we 
have a sense open for it wheresoever and 
howsoever it may arise. 



August 3. 
A MAN lives by believing something ; not 
by debating and arguing about many things. 



August 4. 
Await the issue. In all battles, if you 
await the issue, each fighter has prospered 
according to his right. His right and his 
might, at the close of the account, were one 
and the same. He has fought with all his 
might, and in exact proportion to all his 
right he has prevailed. His very death is 
no victory over him. He dies indeed ; but 
his work very truly lives. 



August 5. 
Smooth falsehood is not order, it is the 
general sum of disoxA^x. Order is triitJi — 
each thing standing on the basis that be- 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 85 



longs to it : order and falsehood cannot 
subsist together. 

August 6. 
Fight on, thou brave, true heart, and 
falter not, through dark future and through 
bright. The cause thou lightest for, so far 
as it is true, no farther, yet precisely so far, 
is very sure of victory. The falsehood alone 
of it will be conquered, will be abolished, 
as it ought to be; but the truth of it is 
part of Nature's own Laws, co-operates with 
the World's eternal tendencies, and cannot 
be conquered, 

August 7. 
The sincere alone can recognize sincerity. 

August 8. 
** Hero-worship," if you will, — yes, 
friends; but, first of all, by being our- 
selves of heroic mind. A whole world of 
Heroes ; a world not of Flunkeys, where no 
Hero-King can reign : that is what we aim 



86 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

at ! We, for our share, will put away all 
Flunkeyism, Baseness, Unveracity, from us; 
we shall then hope to have Nobleness and 
Veracities set over us ; never till then. 



August 9. 
Reality is of God's making ; it is alone 
strong. 



August 10. 
Show me the man you honor. I know 
by this symptom, better than any other, 
what kind of a man you yourself are. For 
you show me there what your ideal of 
manhood is, what kind of a man you long 
inexpressibly to be. 



August ii. 
Properly speaking, all true Work is Re- 
ligion : and whatsoever Religion is not Work 
may go and dwell among the Brahmins, An- 
tinomians. Spinning Dervishes, or where it 
will ; with me it shall have no harbor. Ad- 
mirable was that of the old monks, '' Laborare 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK, 87 



est Orarer " Work is Worship." Older than 
all preached Gospels was this unpreached, 
inarticulate, but ineradicable, forever-en- 
during Gospel. Work, and therein have 
well-being. Man, Son of Earth and Heaven, 
lies there not, in the innermost heart of thee, 
a Spirit of active Method, a Force for Work ; 
and burns like a painfully smoldering fire, 
giving thee no rest till thou unfold it, till 
thou write it down in beneficent Facts 
around thee 1 What is immethodic, waste, 
thou shalt make methodic, regulated, arable ; 
obedient and productive to thee. Where- 
soever thou findest Disorder, there is thy 
eternal enemy ; attack him swiftly, subdue 
him : make Order of him, the subject not 
of Chaos, but of Intelligence, Divinity, and 
Thee. The thistle that grows in thy path, 
dig it out, that a blade of useful grass, a 
drop of nourishing milk, may grow there 
instead. The waste cotton-shrub, gather its 
waste white down, spin it, weave it, that, in 
place of idle litter, there may be folded webs, 
and the naked skin of man be covered. 



88 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK, 

August 12. 
The eternal stars shine out as soon as 
it is dark enough. 



August 13. 
In this world there is one godlike thing, 
the essence of all that was or ever will be of 
godlike in this world — the veneration done 
to human worth by the hearts of men. 



August 14. 
One should have tolerance for a man, hope 
of him ; leave him to try yet what he will do. 
While life lasts, hope lasts for every man. 

August 15. 
To work ! What incalculable sources of 
cultivation lie in that process, in that at- 
tempt ; how it lays hold of the whole man, 
not of a small, theoretical, calculating frac- 
tion of him, but of the whole practical, doing 
and daring and enduring man, thereby to 
awaken dormant faculties ; root out old errors 
at every step ! He that has done nothing 
has known nothing. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 89 

August 16, 
Literary men are a perpetual priesthood. 



August 17, 
He that can discern the lowliness of 
things, we call him poet, painter, man of 
genius, gifted, lovable. 



August 18. 
Of all paths a man could strike into, there 
at any given moment a best path for every 
man : a thing which, here and now, it were 
of all things nicest for him to do ; which 
could he but be led or driven to do, he were 
then doing " like a man " as we phrase it. 
His success, in such case, were complete, his 
felicity a maximum. This path, to find this 
path and walk in it, is the one thing need- 
ful for him. 



August 19. 
The colors and forms of your life will be 
those of \.\\^ cut-glass it has to shine through. 
Curious to think how, for every man, any, 



90 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



the truest, fact is modeled by the nature of 
the man ! 



August 20. 
The gifted man is he who sees the es- 
sential point, and leaves all the rest aside as 
surplusage ; it is his faculty, too, the man of 
business faculty, that he discern the true 
likeness, not the false superficial one, of 
the thing he has got to work in. 

August 21. 
It is a calumny on men to say that they 
are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of 
pleasure, recompense — sugar-plums of any 
kind, in this world or the next ! In the 
meanest mortal there lies something nobler. 



August 22. 
History is a mighty drama, enacted upon 
the theater of time, with suns for lamps and 
eternity for a background. 



August 23. 
Vain it is to sit scheming and plausibly 
discoursing: up and be doing! Ifthyknowl- 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



edge be real, put it forth from thee : grapple 
with real Nature ; try thy theories there, and 
see how they hold out. Do one thing, for 
the first time in thy life do a thing ; a new 
light will rise to thee on the doing of all 
things whatsoever. 

August 24. 
O THOU that pinest in the imprisonment of 
the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods 
for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, 
know this of a truth ; the thing thou seekest 
is already with thee, here or nowhere, couldst 
thou only see ! 

August 25. 
Under all speech that is good for any- 
thing there lies a silence that is better. 



August 26. 
A TRUE poet, in whom resides some ef- 
fluence of wisdom, some tone of the eternal 
melodies, is the most precious gift that can 
be bestowed upon a generation ; we see in 



92 CAKLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

him a freer, purer development of whatever 
is noblest in ourselves. 



August 27. 
Properly there is no knowledge but that 
which is got by working. 



August 28. 
In all epochs of the world's history, we 
shall find the great man to have been the in- 
dispensable saviour of his epoch — the light- 
ning without which the fuel never would 
have burned. 



August 29. 
Whenever there is a sky above him, and 
a world around him, the poet is in his place ; 
and here too, is man's existence, with its 
infinite longings and small acquirings ; its 
ever-thwarted, ever-renewed endeavors, its 
unspeakable aspirations, its fears and hopes, 
that wander through Eternity ; and all the 
mystery of brightness and of gloom that it 
was ever made of, in any age or climate, since 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 93 

man first began to live. The poet must 
have an eye to see things, and a heart to 
understand them. 



August 30. 
Rest ? Rest ? Shall I not have all eternity 
to rest in ? 



August 31. 
Truly, a boundless significance lies in 
work; whereby the humblest craftsman 
comes to attain much, which is of indispen- 
sable use, but which he v/ho is of no craft, 
were he never so high, runs the risk of miss- 
ing. 



September. 

Daily the bending skies solicit man, 
The seasons chariot him from this exile, 
The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing 

wheels, 
The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks 

along. 
Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights 
Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home. 
For Nature, true and like in every place, 
Will hint her secret in a garden patch. 
Or in lone corners of a doleful heath, 
As in the Andes watched by fleets at sea. 
Or the sky-piercing horns of Himmaleh ; 
And when I would recall the scenes I 

dreamed 
On Adirondack steeps, I know 
Small need have I of Turner or Daguerre, 
Assured to find the token once again 
In silver lakes that unexhausted gleam 
And peaceful woods beside my cottage door. 
— Ralph Waldo Emerson. 



94 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 95 



September i. 
This green, flowery, rock-built earth, the 
trees the mountains, rivers, many-sounding 
seas \ that great deep sea of azure that 
swims overhead; the winds sweepmg 
through it ; the black cloud fashioning itself 
together, now pouring out f^re, now hail and 
rain; what is "it? Ay, what ? At bottom 
we do not vet know ; we can never know at 
all It is not by our superior insight that 
we escape the difficulty ; it is by our superior 
levity, our inattention, our want of insight. 
It is by not thinking that we cease to wonder 
at it. Hardened round us, encasing wholly 
every notion we form, is a wrappage of tra- 
ditions, hearsays, mere words. They call 
that fire of the black thunder-cloud elec- 
tricity ■• and lecture learnedly about it, and 
grind the like of it out of glass and silk ; 
butwhat isit? What made it? Whence 
comes it? Whither goes it? Science has 



96 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

done much for us ; but it is a poor science 
that would hide from us the great deep 
sacred infinitude of nescience, whither we 
can never penetrate, on which all science 
swims as a mere superficial film. This world, 
after all our sciences and sciences, is still a 
miracle, wonderful, inscrutable, magical and 
more, to whosoever will think of it. 



September 2. 
Nature is still divine, the revelation of 
the workings of God ; the hero is still wor- 
shipable ; this, under poor cramped incipient 
forms, is what all pagan religions have strug- 
gled, as they could, to set forth. 

September 3. 
Shakespeare and Dante are saints of 
poetry, really, if we will think of it, canon- 
ized, so that it is impiety to meddle with 
them. 



September 4. 
The end of man is an action, and not a 
thought, though it were the noblest. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 97 

Who is a true man? He who does the 
truth, and never holds a principle on which 
he is not prepared in any hour to act, and in 
any hour to risk the consequences of hold- 
ing it. 

September 5. 
Let the vain struggle to read the mystery 
of the Infinite cease to harass us. It is a 
mystery which through all ages we shall only 
read here a line of, there another line of. 
Do we not already know that the name of 
the Infinite is Good, is God ? Here on earth 
we are soldiers, fighting in a foreign land, 
that understand not the plan of the cam- 
paign, and have no need to understand it ; 
seeing well what it is at our hand to be 
done. Let us do it like soldiers, with sub- 
mission, with courage, with a heroic joy. 
Behind us, behind each one of us, lie six 
thousand years of human effort, human con- 
quest : before us the boundless Time, with 
its yet uncreated and unconquered conti- 
nents and Eldorados, which we, even we, 
7 



98 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

have to conquer, to create ; and from the 
bosom of Eternity there shine for us celes- 
tial guiding stars. 

September 6. 
A MAN is not strong who takes convulsion- 
fits ; though six men cannot hold him ; he 
that can walk under the heaviest weight 
without struggling, he is the strong man. 



September 7. 
The strong man will never find work, 
which means difficulty, pain, to the full 
measure of his strength. 



September 8. 
He who, in any way, shows us better than 
we knew before, that a lily of the field is 
beautiful, does he not show it as an effluence 
of the Fountain of all Beauty : as the hand- 
writing made visible there, of the great 
Maker of the Universe ? 



September 9. 
It has been written, an endless signifi- 
cance lies in Work ; a man perfects himself 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 99 



by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, 
fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities : 
and withal man himself first ceases to be 
jungle and foul, unwholesome desert there- 
by. Consider how, even in the meanest 
sort of Labor, the whole soul of a man is 
composed into a kind of real harmony the 
instant he sets himself to work ! Doubt, 
Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, De- 
spair itself, all these like hell-dogs lie be- 
leaguering the soul ; he bends himself with 
free valor against his task, and all these are 
stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off 
into their caves. The man is now a man. 
The blessed glow of Labor in him, is it not 
as purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt 
up, and sour smoke itself there is made bright 
blessed flame ! 

September 10. 

Men speak too much about the world. 

Each one of us here, let the world go how 

it will, and be victorious, or not victorious, 

has he not a life of his own to lead ? It 

LofC. 



lOO CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

were well for lis to live not as fools and 
simulacra, but as wise and realities. 



September ii. 
I BELIEVE you will find in all histories 
that [religion] has been at the head and 
foundation of them all, and that no nation 
that did not contemplate this wonderful uni- 
verse with an awe-stricken and reverential 
feeling that there was a great, unknown, 
omnipotent, and all-wise and all-virtuous 
Being, superintending all men in it and all 
interests in it — no nation ever came to very 
much, nor did any man either, who forgot 
that. 



September 12. 
What worship, for example, is there not 
in mere washing ! Perhaps one of the most 
moral things a man, in common cases, has 
it in his power to do. Strip thyself, go into 
the bath, or were it into the limpid pool and 
running brook, and there wash and be clean ; 
thou wilt step out again a purer and a better 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. lOT 



man. This consciousness of perfect outer 
pureness, that to thy skin there now adheres 
no foreign speck of imperfection, how it 
radiates in on thee, with cunning symboHc 
influences, to thy very soul ! Thou hast an 
increase of tendency toward all good things 
whatsoever. The oldest Eastern Sages, with 
joy and holy gratitude, had felt it so, — and 
that it was the Maker's gift to all. 



September 13. 
What hast thou done, and how ? Happi- 
ness, unhappiness : all that was but the 
wages thou hadst ; thou hast spent all that, 
in sustaining thyself hitherward ; not a coin 
of it remains with thee, it is all spent, eaten ; 
and now thy work, where is thy work? 
Swift, out with it, let us see thy work ! 

September 14. 
That great mystery of Time, were there 
no other ; the illimitable, silent, never-rest- 
ing thing called time, rolling, rushing on, 
swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, 
on which we and all the universe swim like 



I02 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

exhalations, like apparitions which are and 
then are not : this is forever very literally 
a miracle ; a thing to strike one dumb — for 
we have no word to speak about it. 



September 15. 
Given the men a People choose, the 
People itself, in its exact worth and worth- 
lessness, is given. A heroic people chooses 
heroes, and is happy ; a valet or flunkey 
people chooses sham heroes, what are called 
quacks, thinking them heroes, and is not 
happy. The grand summary of a man's 
spiritual condition, what brings out all his 
herohood and insight, or all his flunkey-hood 
and horn-eyed dimness, is this question put 
to him, What man dost thou honor ? Which 
is thy ideal of a man ; or nearest that? So 
too of a People : for a People too, every 
People, speaks its choice, — in the course of 
a century or so. Nor are electoral methods, 
reform bills and such like, unimportant. A 
People's electoral methods are, in the long- 
run, the express image of its electoral talent ; 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 103 



tending and gravitating perpetually, irre- 
sistibly, to a conformity with that : and are, 
at all stages, very significant of the People. 



September 16. 
Let us learn through one another what it 
is to live. Let us set our minds and habi- 
tudes in order, and grow more under the 
peaceful sunshine of nature ; that whatever 
fruit or flowers have been implanted in our 
spirits may ripen wholesomely and be dis- 
tributed in due season. 



September 17- 
Labor is Life ! from the inmost heart of 
the Worker rises his God-given Force, the 
sacred celestial Life— essence breathed into 
him by Almighty God; from his inmost 
heart awakens him to all nobleness, — to 
all knowledge, '' self-knowledge," and much 
else, so soon as Work fitly begins. 



September 18. 
Let us stand on our own basis, at any 
rate ! On such shoes as we ourselves can 



104 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



get. On frost and mud if you will, but 
honestly on that ; — on the reality and sub- 
stance which Nature gives us, not on the 
semblance, on the thing she has given an- 
other than us ! 



vSeptember 19. 

** Work is Worship ; " yes, in a highly 
considerable sense, which in the present state 
of ** all worship" who is there that can un- 
fold! He that understands it well, under- 
stands the Prophecy of the whole Future : 
the last Evangel, which has included all 
others. Its cathedral the Dome of Immen- 
sity;— hast thou seen it? :oped with the 
star-galaxies ; paved with the green mosaic 
of land and ocean ; and for altar, verily, the 
Star-throne of the Eternal ! Its litany and 
psalmody the noble acts, the heroic work 
and suffering, and true heart-utterance of all 
the Valiant of the Sons of Men. Its choir 
music the ancient Winds and Oceans, and 
deep-toned inarticulate, but most speaking- 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 105 



voices of Destiny and History: supernal 
ever as of old. 

September 20. 
There shall be a depth of Silence in 
thee, deeper than the Sea, which is but ten 
miles deep; a Silence unsoundable: known 
to God only. Thou shalt be a great man. 
Yes, my World-Soldier, thou of the World- 
Marine service,— thou wilt have to be greater 
than this tumultuous unmeasured World 
here round thee is ; thou, in thy strong soul, 
as with wrestler's arms, shalt embrace it, 
harness it down, and make it bear thee on ; 
to new Americas, or whither God wills ! 

September 21. 
Thought does not die, but only is 
changed. 

September 22. 
Not by flattering our appetite ; no, by 
awakening the heroic that slumbers in every 
heart, can any religion gain followers. 



io6 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



September 23. 
A PERSON is ever holy to us. Is the piti- 
fullest mortal person, think you, indifferent 
to us? Is it not rather our heartfelt wish 
to be made one with him, — to unite him to 
us by gratitude, by admiration, even by fear ; 
or, failing all these, to unite ourselves to 
him? 



September 24. 
No great man lives in vain. 



September 25. 
Loyalty and sovereignty are everlast- 
ing in the world — and there is this in them, 
that they are grounded, not on garnitures and 
semblances, but on realities and sincerities. 



September 26. 

Eternity, which cannot be far off, is my 

one strong city. I look into it fixedly now 

and then. All terrors about it seem to me 

superfluous. The universe is full of love 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK, 107 



and inexorable sternness and veracity, and 
it remains forever true that God reigns. 
Patience, silence, hope. 



September 27. 
vho 
s fo: 
right man. 



September 27. 
A MAN who cannot hold his peace, till the 
time comes for speaking and acting, is no 



September 28. 
We are not sent into this world to do any- 
thing into which we cannot put our hearts. 
We have certain work to do for our bread, 
and that is to be done strenuously ; other 
work to do for our delight, and that is to 
be done heartily ; neither is to be done by 
halves and shifts, but with a will, and what 
is not worth this effort is not to be done 
at all. 

September 29. 
Silence as of death ; nothing but the 
granite cliffs ruddy-tinged, the peaceable 
gurgling of that slow-heaving Polar-Ocean, 



io8 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

over which, in the utmost North, the great 
Sun hangs low and lazy, as if he too were 
slumbering. Yet is his cloud-couch wrought 
of crimson cloth of gold ; yet does his light 
stream over the mirror of waters, like a trem- 
ulous fire-pillar, shooting downward toward 
the abyss, and hide under my feet. In such 
moments. Solitude also is invaluable, for 
who would speak, or be looked on, when be- 
hind him lies all Europe and Africa, fast 
asleep, except the watchmen ; and before 
him the silent immensity, and Palace of the 
Eternal whereof our Sun is but a porch- 
lamp ! 



September 30. 
It is the greatest invention man ever 
made, this of marking down the unseen 
thought that is in him by written characters. 



©ctobet* 

The beauty that shimmers in the yellow 
afternoon of October— whoever could clutch 

it? 

—Ralph Waldo Emerson. 



109 



no CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



October i. 
Give every man the meed of honor he 
has merited, you have the ideal world of 
poets ; . . . a world such as the idle poets 
dream of, — such as the active poets, the 
heroic and the true of men are incessantly 
toiling to achieve, and more and more realize. 
Achieved, realized, it never can be ; striven 
after, and approximated, it must forever be, 
— woe to us if at any time it be not ! 



October 2. 
We have not read an author till we have 
seen his object, whatever it may be, as he 
saw it. In any other way we do him in- 
justice if we judge him. 

October 3. 
Fact and Suffrage : what a discrepancy ! 



October 4- 
Effect ! Influence ! Utility ! Let a man 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



do his work ; the fruit of it is the care of 
Another than he. 



October 5- 
The older I grow — and now I stand on 
the brink of eternity — the more comes back 
to me that sentence in the Catechism which 
I learned when I was a child, and the fuller 
and deeper its meaning became — '' What is 
the chief end of man ? To glorify God and 
enjoy Him forever." 

October 6. 
We must repeat the oft-repeated saying, 
that it is unworthy a religious man to view 
an irreligious one either with alarm or aver- 
sion ; or with any other feeling than regret, 
and hope, and brotherly commiseration. 

October 7. 
To give our approval aright, — alas ! to do 
every one of us what lies in him that the 
honorable man everywhere, and he only, 
have honor, that the able man everywhere 
be put into the place which is fit for him, 



112 CARLYLE YEAR BOOK. 

which is his by eternal right : is not this the 
sum of all social morality for every citizen of 
this world? . . . Imperfectly, and not per- 
fectly done, we know this duty must always 
be. Not done at all ; no longer remem- 
bered as a thing which God and Nature and 
the Eternal Voices do require to be done, 
— alas ! we see too well what kind of a world 
that ultimately makes for us. 



October 8. 
Man is perennially interesting to man ; 
nay, if we look strictly to it there is nothing 
else interesting. 

October 9. 
Wise command, wise obedience ; the capa- 
bility of these two is the net measure of cul- 
ture and human virtue in every man. 



October 10. 
The situation that has not its duty, its 
Ideal, was never yet occupied by man. 
Yes, here in this poor, miserable, hampered. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 113 

despicable Actual, wherein thou even now 
standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal : work 
it out therefrom, and working believe, live, 
be free. Fool ! the Ideal is in thyself. The 
impediment, too, is in thyself ; thy condi- 
tion is but the stuff thou art to shape that 
same Ideal out of : What matters whether 
such stuff be of this stuff or that, so the 
form thou givest it be heroic, be poetic. 



October ii. 
Only the noble lift willingly with their 
whole strength. 



OCTOBKR 12. 

Aimed aloft, he finds himself lifted into 
the evening sunset light. The mountain- 
ranges are beneath and folded together : 
only the loftier summits look down here and 
there as on a second plain ; lakes also lie clear 
and earnest in solitude. No trace of man 
now visible. But sunwards, lo you ! how it 
towers sheer up, a world of mountains, the 
diadem and center of the mountain-region ! 
8 



114 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

A hundred and hundred range peaks, in 
the last Hght of day ; all glowing, of gold 
and amethyst, like giants, spirits of wildness. 



October 13. 
Shall I tell you which is the one intol- 
erable sort of slavery ; the slavery over 
which the very gods weep ! It is the slavery 
of the strong to the weak ; of the great and 
noble-minded to the small and mean ! The 
slavery of wisdom to folly. 



October 14. 
The Real, if you will stand by it, is 
respectable. The coarsest hobnailed pair of 
shoes, if honestly made according to the 
laws of fact and leather, are not ugly : they 
are honest, and fit for their object; the 
highest eye may look on them without dis- 
pleasure, nay, with a kind of satisfaction. 
This rude packing-case, it is faithfully made ; 
square to the rule, and formed with rough 
and ready strength against injury ; — fit for 
its use ; not a pretentious hypocrisy, but a 
modest serviceable fact ; whoever pleases 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



to look upon it, will find the image of a 
humble manfulness in it, and will pass on 
with some infinitesimal impulse to thank the 
gods. 



October 15. 
That one man should die ignorant, who 
had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a 
tragedy, were it to happen more than twenty 
times in the minute, as by some computa- 
tions it does. 



October 16. 
No thought that ever dwelt honestly as 
true in the heart of a man but was an honest 
insight into God's truth on man's part, and 
has an essential truth in it which endures 
through all changes, an everlasting posses- 
sion for us all. 



October 17. 
Yes, all manner of help, and pious re- 
sponse from Men of Nature, is always what 
we call silent ; cannot speak or come to light, 
till it be seen, till it be spoken to. In 



Ii6 CARLYLE YEAR-BOO A'. 

very truth, for every noble work, the possi- 
biUtieswill lie diffused through Immensity; 
inarticulate, undiscoverable except to faith. 
Like Gideon thou shalt spread out thy 
fleece at the door of thy tent ; see whether 
under the wide arch of Heaven there -be 
any bounteous moisture, or none. Thy 
heart and life-purpose shall be as a miracu- 
lous Gideon's fleece, spread out in silent ap- 
peal to Heaven ; and from the kind Immen- 
sities, what from the poor unkind Localities 
and towns any country Parishes there never 
could, blessed dew-moisture to suffice thee 
shall have fallen ! 



October i8. 
My brother, the brave man has to give his 
Life away. Give it, I advise thee, — thou 
dost not expect to sell thy life in an ade- 
quate manner? What price, for example, 
would content thee? The just price of the 
Life to thee ; — why, God's entire Creation 
to thyself, the whole Universe of Space, the 
whole Eternity of Time, and what they hold ; 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



that is the price which would content thee; 
that, and if thou wilt, be candid, nothing 
short of that ! It is thy all ; and for it thou 
wouldst have all. Thou art an unreasonable 
nnortal ; — or rather thou art a poor infinite 
mortal, who, in thy narrow clay-prison here, 
seemest so unreasonable ! Thou wilt never 
sell thy Life, or any part of thy Life, in a 
satisfactory manner. Give it, like a royal 
heart; let the price be Nothing ; thou hast, 
then, in a certain sense, got All for it. 
The heroic man — and is not every man, 
God be thanked, a potential here? — has to 
do so, in all times and circumstances. 



October 19. 
Home between five and six, with muddy 
mackintoshes off, and the nightmare locked 
up for awhile. I tried for an hour's sleep be- 
fore my (solitary, dietetic, altogether simple) 
bit of dinner ; but first always came up for 
half an hour to the drawing-room and her, 
where a bright kindly fire was sure to be 
burning (candles hardly lit, all in trustful 



Il8 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK, 

chiaroscuro), a pipe of tobacco (which I had 
learned to take sitting on the rug, with my 
back to the jamb, and door never so little 
open, so that all the smoke, if I was careful, 
went up the chimncy\ this was the one 
bright portion of my black day. Oh, those 
evening half-hours, how beautiful and blessed 
they were ! » = o She was oftcnest reclining 
on the sofa ; wearied enough, she too, with 
her day's doings and endurings. But her 
history, even of what was bad, had .such 
grace and truth and spontaneous tinkling 
melody of a naturally cheerful and lov- 
ing heart, that I never anywhere enjoyed the 
like, o o o Never again shall I have such 
melodious, humanly beautiful half-hours ; 
they were the rainbow of my poor dripping 
day, and reminded me that there otherwise 
was a sun. 



October 20. 
All human interests, combined human 
endeavors, and social growths in this world, 
have, at a certain stage of their development, 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 119 



required organizing : and Work, the grandest 
of human interests, does now require it. 
God knows, the task will be hard ; but no 
noble task was ever easy. This task will 
wear away your lives, and the lives of your 
sons and grandsons ; but for what purpose, 
if not for tasks like this, were lives given to 
men? 

October 21. 
Out of the loud piping whirlwind, au- 
dibly to him that has ears, the Highest-God is 
aeain announcing in these days : - Idleness 
shall not be." God has said it, man cannot 
gainsay= 

October 22. 
MEN do reverence men. Men do worship 
in that '' one temple of the world," as No- 
valis calls it, the Presence of a Man ! Hero- 
worship, true and blessed, or else mistaken 
false and accursed, goes on everywhere and 
everywhen. . . . Hero»worship, in the souls 
of the heroic, of the clean and wise —it is the 



I20 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

perpetual presence of Heaven in our poor 
earth; when it is not there, Heaven is veiled 
from us; and all is under Heaven's ban and 
interdict, and there is no worship, or worth= 
ship, or worth or blessedness in the earth 
any more ! 



OCTOBKR 23. 

Not in having '' no business " with men, 
but in having no unjust business with them, 
and in having all manner of true and just 
business, can either his or their blessedness 
be found possible, and this waste world be- 
come, for both parties, a home and peopled 
garden. 

October 24. 
I conclude that the Men of Letters, too, 
may become a " chivalry," an actual instead of 
a virtual Priesthood, with result immeasur- 
able, so soon as there is nobleness in them- 
selves for that. And to a certainty not 
sooner I Of intrinsic Valetism, you cannot, 
with whole ParHaments to help you, make a 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 121 

Heroism. Doggeries never so gold-plated, 
Doggeries never so diplomaed, bepuffed, 
gaslighted, continue Doggeries, and must 
take the fate of such. 



October 25. 
But it is to you, ye workers, who do 
already work, and are as grown men, noble 
and honorable in a sort, that the whole 
world calls for new work and nobleness- 
Subdue mutiny, discord, wide-spread despair, 
by manfulness, justice, mercy and wisdom. 
Chaos is dark, deep as Hell ; let light be, and 
there is instead a green flowery worldo 



October 26. 
A MAN, be the Heavens ever praised ! is suf= 
ficient for himself ; yet were ten men, united 
in love, capable of being and doing what ten 
thousand singly would fail iuo Infinite is the 
help man can yield to man. 

October 27. 
There is no idler, sadder, quieter, more 
ghostlike man in the world even now, than 



122 CAKLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

I . „ o Men's very sorrows, and the tears 
one's heart weeps when the eye is dry, 
what is in that either? In an hour, will not 
death make it all still again ? Nevertheless 
the old brook — Middiebie burn we call it — 
still leaps into its * caudron ' here, singing me 
a song with slight variations of score, these 
several thousand years — a song better for 
me than Pasta's \ I look on the sapphire of 
Sto Bees Head and the Solway mirror from 
the gable window. I ride to the top of 
Blanseery and see all round from Ettrick 
Pen to Helvellyn, from Tyndale and North- 
umberland to Cainsmuir and Ayrshire, 
Voir ccst avoir. A brave old earth after 
all, in which, as above said, I am content to 
acquiesce without quarrel, and, at lowest, 
hold my peace. One night, late, I rode 
through the village where I was born. The 
old kirkyard tree, a huge old gnarled ash, 
was nestling itself softly against the great 
twilight in the north. A star or two looked 
out, and the old graves were all there, and my 
father and my sister ; and God was above all. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK, 123 

October 28. 
Higher considerations have to teach us 
that the god Wish is not the true God. 



October 29. 
It is well said, in every sense, that a man's 
religion is the chief fact with regard to him. 



October 30. 
The only happiness a brave man ever 
troubled himself with asking much about 
was, happiness enough to get his work 
donCo Not, I can't eat ! but, I can't work ! 
that was the burden of all wise complaining 
among men. It is, after all, the one unhap- 
piness of man. That he cannot work, that 
he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled. 



October 31. 
How indescribably the Good grows, and 
propagates itself, even among the entangle- 
ments of Evil ! 



1Rov>ember» 

Over the winter glaciers 

I see the summer glow, 
And through the wild-piled snowdrift 

The warm rosebuds below. 

— Ralph Waldo Emerson. 



124 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 125 



November i. 
Hast thou looked at the Potter's wheel, 

one of the venerable objects ; old as the 

Prophet Ezekiel and far older? Rude 
lumps of clay, how they spin themselves up, 
by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circu- 
lar disks. And fancy the most assiduous 
Potter, but without his wheel, reduced to 
make dishes, or rather amorphous botches, 
by mere kneading and baking ! Even such 
a Potter were Destiny with a human soul 
that would rest and lie at ease, that would 
not work and spin ! Of an idle, unrevolving 
man the kindest Destiny, like the most assid- 
uous Potter without wheel, can bake and 
knead nothing other than a botch : let her 
spend on him what expensive coloring and 
gilding and enameling she will, he is but a 
botch, not a dish ; no, a bulging, kneaded, 
crooked, shambling, squink-cornered, amor- 
phous botch,— a mere enameled vessel of 
dishonor ! Let the idle think of that. 



126 CARLYLR YEAR-BOOK. 

November 2. 
My poor little Jeannie! my poor, ever- 
true life-partner, hold up thy little heart. 
We have had a sore life-pilgrimage together, 
much bad road, poor lodging.and bad weath- 
er, little like what I could have wished or 
dreamed for my little woman. But we 
stood it, too ; and, if it please God, there 
are yet good years ahead of us, better and 
quieter much than the past have been now 
and then. ]\Iy poor, heavy-laden, brave, un- 
complaining Jeannie ! Oh, forgive me, for- 
give me, for the much I have thoughtlessly 
done and omitted, far, far, at all times, from 
the poor purpose of my mind. And God 
help us ! thee, poor suffering soul, and also 
me. God be with thee ! 



November 3. 
If I do not stand to myself and to my 
own cause it will be the worse for me. 
Heaven help me ! Oh, Heaven ! But it is 
so always. The elements of our work lie 
scattered, disorganized, as if in a thick. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



viscous, chaotic ocean, ocean illimitable in 
all its three dimensions ; and we must swim 
and sprawl towards them, must snatch them, 
and victoriously piece them together as we 
can. Eheu ! Shall I try Frederick, or not 
try him ! — Journal, 1852. 



November 4. 
Old age is not in itself matter for sorrow. 
It is matter for thanks, if we have left our 
work done behind us. 



November 5. 
If men will turn away their faces from 
God, and set up idols, temporary phantasms, 
instead of the Eternal One — alas ! the con- 
sequences are from of old well known. 



November 6. 
One is warned by nature herself not to 
" sit down by the side of sad thoughts " and 
dwell voluntarily on what is sorrowful and 
painful. Yet at the same time one has to 
say for oneself — at least I have — that all the 



128 CARLYLE YEAR- BO OK. 

good I ever got came to nic rather in the 
shape of sorrow ; and there is nothing noble 
or god-like in this world but has in it some- 
thing of " infinite sadness," \'cry different 
indeed from what the current moral philoso- 
phies represent it to us ; and surely in a time 
like ours, if in any time, it is good for a man 
to be driven, were it by never such harsh 
methods, into looking at this great universe 
with his own eyes, for himself and not for 
another, and trying to adjust himself truly 
there. 



November 7. 
Man is a born owl. I consider it good, 
however, that one do not get into the state 
of a beetle, that one try to keep one's shell 
open, or at least openable. I mean to per- 
sist in endeavorinc: that. 



November 8. 
Tins afternoon I had a beautiful walk on 
the Dairland Hills moor. A little walking 
shakes away my sluggishness. The bare 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 129 

expanse of silent green upland is round me, 
far off the world of mountains, and the sea all 
changed to silver. Out of the dusky sunset 
— for vapors had fallen — the v/indows of Car- 
lisle City gleamed visibly upon me ; twenty 
thousand human bipeds whom I could cover 
with my hat. On these occasions, unfortu- 
nately, I think almost nothing. Vague 
dreams, delusions, idle reminiscences, and 
confusions are all that occupy me. I am an 
unprofitable servant. 



November 9. 

The great soul of the world i^jiist. With 

a voice soft as the harmony of spheres, yet 

stronger, sterner, than all the thunders, this 

message does now and then reach us through 

the hollow jargon of things. This great fact 

we live in, and were made by. It is a " noble 

Spartan mother" to all of us that dare be 

sons to it. Courage ! We must not quit our 

shields; we must return home upon our 

shields, having fought in the battle till we 

died. 
6 



CA RL YL E 3 'KA R-B O OK 



November io. 
Thought once awakened docs not again 
slumber ; unfolds itself into a system of 
thought ; grows, in man after man, genera- 
tion after generation — till its full stature is 
reached ; and such systems of thought can 
grow no farther, but must give place to an- 
other. 



November ii. 
I llxWE not got one word to stand upon 
paper in regard to Oliver. The beginnings 
of work are even more formidable than the 
executing of it. I seem to myself at present, 
and for a long while past, to be sunk deep, 
fifty miles deep, below the region of articu- 
lation, and, if ever I rise to speak again, 
must raise whole continents with me. Some 
hundred of times I have felt, and scores of 
times I have said and written, that Oliver is 
an impossibility ; yet I am still found at it, 
without any visible results at all. Remorse, 
too, for my sinful, disgraceful sloth accom- 
panies me, as it well may. I am, as it were, 



CAKLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 131 

without a language. Tons of dull books 
have I read on this matter, and it is still only 
looming as through thick mists on my eye. 
There looming, or flaming visible — did it 
ever flame, which it has never yet been made 
to do — in what terms am I to set it forth ? 
I wish often I could write rhyme. A new 
form from centre to surface, unlike what I 
find anywhere in myself or others, would 
alone be appropriate for the indescribable 
chiaro-oscuro and waste bewilderment of this 
subject. — Journal, 1842. 



November 12. 
The stars in the heavens and the little 
blue-bells by the wayside alike show forth 
the handiwork of Him who is Almighty, 
who is all good. 



November 13. 
The Future alone belongs to us. Let us 
doubly and trebly struggle to profit by tliat — 
turn tJiat to double and treble account. 



132 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



November 14- 
The essence of our being, the mystery in 
us that calls itself " I " — ah, what words have 
we for such things ?— is a breath of heaven; 
the hicfhest bein^r reveals himself in man. 



November 15. 
The man who cannot w^onder, who does 
not habitually wonder (and worship), were he 
president of innumerable Royal Societies, 
and carried the whole Mecanique Celeste 
and Hegel's Philosophy and the epitome of 
Laboratories and Observatories with their 
results, in his single head, — is but a Pair of 
Spectacles behind which there is no Eye. 
Let those who have eyes look through him, 
then he may be useful. 



November 16. 
So many beautiful styles of books, with 
nothing in them ; a man is a malefactor to 
the world who writes such ! They are the 
avoidable kind. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 133 



November 17. 
It is in what I called Portrait-painting, de- 
lineating of men and things, especially of 
men, that Shakespeare is great. It is unexam- 
pled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity 
of Shakespeare. The thing he looks at re- 
veals not this or that face of it, but its in- 
most heart and generic secret : it dissolves 
itself as in light before him, so that he dis- 
cerns the perfect structure of it. 



November 18. 
Worship of a hero is transcendent wonder 
of a great man. 



November 19. 
The latest Gospel in this world is. Know 
thy work and do it. '' Know thyself ; " long 
enough has that poor *' self " of thine tor- 
mented thee ; thou wilt never get to 
" know " it, I believe ! Think it not thy 
hiisincss, this of knowing thyself ; thou art 
in unknowable individual ; know what thou 



134 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

canst work at : and work at it like a 
Hercules ; that will be thy better plan. 



November 20. 
Absolutely without originality there is 
no num. 



November 21. 
Had Johnson left nothini; hw\,\\\^ Diction- 
ary one might have traced there a great in- 
tellect — a genuine man. There is in it a 
kind of architectural nobleness ; it stands 
there like a great, solid, square-built edifice, 
finished, symmetrically complete : you judge 
that a true builder did it. 



November 22. 
The most significant feature in the history 
of an epoch, is the manner it has of wel- 
coming a great man. 



November 23. 
The hero is he who believes in the inward 
sphere of things, in the true, divine and eter 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



135 



nal, which exists always, unseen to most, 
under the temporary, trivial ; his being is in 
that ; he declares that abroad, by act or 
speech as it may be, in declaring himself 
abroad. His life is a piece of the everlasting 
heart of nature herself ; all men's life is, — 
but the weak many know not the fact, and 
are untrue to it, in most times ; the strong 
few are strong, heroic, perennial, because it 
cannot be hidden from them. 



November 24. 
Nature does not make all great men, 
more than all other men, in the self-same 
mold. 



November 25. 
We speak of the Volume of Nature ; and 
truly a Volume it is, — whose Author and 
writer is God. To read it ! Dost thou, 
docs man, so much as well know the al- 
phabet thereof? With its words, sentences, 
and grand descriptive pages, poetical and 
philosophical, spread out through Solar 



136 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

Systems, and thousands of years, we shall 
not try thee. It is a volume written in ce- 
lestial hieroglyphics, in the true Sacred-writ- 
ing; of which even the Prophets are happy 
that they can read here a line and there a 
line As for your Institutes, and Academies 
of Science, they strive bravely ; and, from 
amid the thick-curved, inextricably inter- 
twisted hieroglyphic writings, pick out, by 
dexterous combination, some Letters in the 
vulgar Character, and therefrom put to- 
gether this and the other economic Recipe, of 
high avail in practice. That Nature is more 
than some boundless volume of such Recipes, 
or huge, well-nigh inexhaustible Domestic- 
Cookery-Book, of which the whole secret 
will in this manner one day evolve itself, the 
fewest dream. 



November 26. 
Instead of saying that man is the crea- 
ture of circumstances, it would be nearer 
the mark to say that man is the architect of 
circumstances. Our strength is measured 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 137 

by our plastic power. From the same ma- 
terial one man builds palaces, another hotels; 
one warehouses, another villas ; bricks and 
mortar are mortar and bricks until the 
architect can make them something else. 
Thus it is that in the same family, in the 
same circumstances, one man rears a stately 
edifice, while his brother, vacillating and in- 
competent, lives forever amid ruins; the 
block of granite which was an obstacle in 
the pathway of the weak became a step- 
ping-stone in the pathway of the strong. 



November 27. 
I CONFESS, I have no notion of a truly 
great man that could not be all sorts of men. 



November 28. 
What an enormous caniera-obscura m?i^m~ 
fier is tradition! How a thing grows in the 
human imagination, when love, worship and 
all that lies in the human heart is there to 
encourage it. 



138 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

November 29. 
The body of all truth dies, and yet in all 
I say there is a soul which never dies, which 
in new and ever-nobler embodiment lives 
immortal as man himself ! 



November 30. 
Detached : separated ! I say there is no 
such separation ; nothing hitherto was ever 
stranded, cast aside; but all, were it only a 
withered leaf, works together with all ; is 
borne forward in the bottomless, shoreless 
flood of Action, and lives through perpetual 
metamorphoses. The withered leaf is not 
dead and lost, there are Forces in it and 
around it, though working in inverse order; 
else how could it rot? Despise not the rag 
from which man makes Paper, or the matter 
from which the earth makes Corn. Rightly 
viewed, no meanest object is insignificant ; 
all objects are as windows through which 
the philosophic eye looks into Infinitude 
itself. 



December. 

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, 
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, 
Seems nowhere to alight ; the whited air 
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the 

heaven. 
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's 

end. 
The sled and traveler stopped, the courier's 

feet 
Delayed, all friends shut out, the house- 
mates sit 
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed 
In a tumultuous privacy of storm. 

— Ralph Waldo Emerson. 



139 



140 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



December i. 

Some " Chivalry of Labor," some noble 
Humanity and practical Divincness of Labor 
will yet be realized on this Earth. Or why 
ivill^ why do, we pray to Heaven, without 
setting our own shoulder to the wheel? 
The Present, if it will have the Future ac- 
complish, shall itself commence. Thou who 
prophesiest, who believest, begin thou to 
fulfil. Here or nowhere, now equally as at 
any time. 



December 2. 

To the poet, as to every other, we say first 
of all, see if you cannot do that; it is no use 
to keep stringing rhymes together, jingling 
sensibilities against each other and name 
yourself a poet ; there is no hope for you. 
If you can, there is, in prose or verse, in ac- 
tion or speculation, all manner of hope. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 141 

December 3. 

Nothing so endures as a truly spoken 
word. 

All men are to an unspeakable degree 
brothers, each man's life a strange em- 
blem of every man's ; and Human Portraits, 
faithfully drawn, are of all pictures the wel- 
comest on human walls. 



December 4- 
Dear old mother, weak and sick and dear 
to me, while I live in God's creation, what a 
day has this been in my solitary thought ; 
for, except a few words to Jane, I have not 
spoken to any one, nor, indeed, hardly seen 
any one, it being dusk and dark before I 
went out — a dim, silent Sabbath day, the 
sky foggy, dark and damp, and a universal 
stillness the consequence, and it is this day 
gone fifty-eight years that I was born. And 
my poor mother ! Well! we are all in God's 
hands. Surely God is good. Surely we 
ought to trust in Him, or what trust is there 



142 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

for the sons of men ? Oh, my clear mother ! 
Let it ever be a comfort to you, however 
weak you are, that you did your part honor- 
ably and well while in strength, and were a 
noble mother to me and to us all. I am 
now myself grown old, and have had various 
things to do and suffer for so many years; 
but there is nothing I ever had to be so 
much thankful for as the mother I had. 
That is a truth which I know well, and per- 
haps this day again it may be some com- 
fort to you. Yes, surely, for if there had 
been any good in the things I have uttered 
in the world's hearing, it was j't7//r voice es- 
sentially that was speaking through me ; 
essentially, what you and my brave father 
meant and taught me to mean ; this was the 
purport of all I spoke and wrote, and if in 
the few years that may remain to me, I am 
to get any more written for the world, will 
still be yours. May God reward you, dearest 
mother, for all you have done for me ! I 
never can. Ah, no ! but I will think of it 
with gratitude and pious love so long as I 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 143 

have the power of thinking. And I will 
pray God's blessing on you, now and always. 
Chelsea, Dec. 4, 1853. 



December 5. 
Brother, thou hast possibility in thee 
for much : the possibility of writing on the 
eternal skies the record of a heroic life. 
That noble, down-fallen or yet unborn " Im- 
possibility," thou canst lift it up, thou canst, 
by thy soul's travail, bring it into clear being. 



December 6. 
Neither let mistakes nor wrong directions 
of which every man, in his studies and else- 
where, falls into wrong, discourage you. 
There is precious instruction to be got by 
finding we were wrong. Let a man try 
faithfully, manfully, to be right ; he will 
grow daily more and more right. 

December 7. 
All true work is sacred : in all true Work, 
were it but true hand-labor, there is some- 
thing of divineness. Labor, wide as the 
Earth, has its summit in Heaven. Sweat 



144 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

of the brow, and up from that to sweat of 
the brain, sweat of the heart ; which includes 
all Kepler calculations, Newton meditations, 
all Science, all spoken Epics, all acted Hero- 
isms, Martyrdoms, up to that Agony of 
bloody sweat, which all men have called 
divine ! O, brother, if this is not " worship," 
then I say, the more pity for worship : for 
this is the noblest thing yet discovered un- 
der God's sky. Who art thou that com- 
plainest of thy life of toil? Complain not. 
Look up, wearied brother; see thy fellow- 
workmen there, in God's Eternity : surviving 
there, they alone surviving: sacred band of 
Immortals, Celestial Bodyguards of the Em- 
pire of Mankind. Even in the weak Human 
Memory they survive so long, as saints, as 
heroes, as gods ; they alone surviving : peo- 
pling, they alone, the unmeasured solitudes 
of Time. 



December 8. 
The poet is a heroic figure belonging to 
all ages ; whom all ages possess, when once 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 145 

he is produced, whom the newest age as the 
oldest may produce — and will produce, 
always when nature pleases. Let nature 
send a hero-soul ; in no age is it other than 
possible that he may be shaped into a poet. 



December 9. 
Man's spiritual nature, the vital force that 
dwells in him, is essentially one and indivis- 
ible ; that what we call imagination, fancy, 
understanding, and so-forth, are but different 
figures of the same power of insight, all in- 
dissolubly connected with each other, physi- 
ognomically related ; that if we knew one 
of them, we might know all of them. Mo- 
rality itself, what we call the moral quality 
of a man, what is this but another side of 
the one vital force whereby he is and works ? 



DECEMBER 10. 

The wise man is but a clever infant, spell- 
ing letters from a hieroglyphical prophet 
book, the lexicon of which lies in eternity. 
10 



146 CAKLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

December ii. 
Sweep away the illusions of time ; glance, 
if thou have eyes, from the near morning 
cause to the far-distant Mover! Then saw- 
est thou that this fair universe were in the 
meanest promise thereof, is in very deed, the 
Star-domed City of God ; that through every 
star, through every grass-blade, and most 
through every living soul, the glory of a 
present God still beams. But Nature, which 
is the Time-vesture of God, and reveals Him 
to the wise, hides Him from the foolish. 



December 12. 
*' Happy," my brother ! First of all, what 
difference is it whether thou art happy or 
not ? To-day becomes Yesterday so fast, all 
To-morrows become Yesterdays ; and then 
there is no question whatever of the ** happi- 
ness," but quite another question. Nay, 
thou hast such a sacred pity left, at least for 
thyself, thy very pains, once gone over into 
Yesterday, become joys to thee. Besides, 
thou knowest not what heavenly blessed- 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 147 

ness and indispensable sanative virtue was in 
them ; thou shalt only know it after many 
days, when thou art wiser ! 



December 13. 
No man works save under conditions. 
The sculptor cannot set his own free thought 
before us ; but his thought as he could trans- 
late it into the stone that was given, with 
the tools were given. Disjecta mcvibra are 
all that we find of any poet, or of any man. 



DECEMBER 14. 

Tolerance has to tolerate the ^/;/essen- 
tial, and to see well what that is. Tolerance 
has to be noble, measured, just in its very 
wrath, when it can tolerate no longer. But, 
on the whole, we are not here to tolerate ! 
We are here to resist, to control and van- 
quish withal. We do not tolerate falsehoods, 
thieveries, iniquities, when they fasten on 
us; w^e say to them, Thou art false, thou 
art not tolerable! We are here to extin- 
guish falsehoods and put an end to them. 



148 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

December 15. 
But our work, — behold that is not abol- 
ished, that has not vanished : our work, be- 
hold it remains, or the want of it remains : 
and that is now the sole question with us 
forevermore ! Brief, bawling Day, with its 
noisy phantasms, its poor paper-crowns, 
tinsel-gilt, is gone ; and divine everlasting 
Night, with her star-diadems, with her silence 
and her veracities, is come ! What hast thou 
done, and how ? 



DECEMBER 16. 



What greater calamity can fall upon a 
man than the loss of worship ? 



December 17. 

Knowest thou not, thou canst not move 
a step on this earth without finding some 
duty to be done, and that every man is use- 
ful to his kind, by the very fact of his exist- 
ence ? 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK, 149 

Dkcember 18. 

It is Nature's highest reward to a true, sim- 
ple, great soul that he gets thus to be a part 
of herself. Such a man's work, whatsoever 
he with utmost conscious exertion and fore- 
thought shall accomplish, grows up withal 
unconsciously from the unknown deeps in 
him — as the oak tree grows from the earth's 
bosom, as the mountains and waters shape 
themselves, with a symmetry grounded on 
nature's own laws, conformable to all truth 
whatsoever. 



December 19. 

The spoken Word, the written Poem, is 
said to be an epitome of the man ; how 
much more the done Work. Whatsoever of 
morality and intelligence ; what of patience, 
perseverance, faithfulness, of method, in- 
sight, ingenuity, energy ; in a word, what- 
ever of Strength the man had in him will lie 
written in the Work he does. 



15° 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



December 20. 

For all human things do require to have 
an Ideal in them ; to have some Soul in 
them. And wonderful it is to see how the 
Ideal or Soul, place it in what ugliest Body 
you may, will irradiate said Body with its 
own nobleness : will gradually, incessantly, 
mould, modify, new-form, or reform, said 
ugliest Body, and make it at last beautiful, 
and to a certain degree divine ! 



December 21. 

The man whom Nature has appointed to 
do great things is, first of all, furnished with 
that openness to Nature which renders him 
incapable of being insincere. To his large, 
open, deep-fccling heart Nature is a fact, all 
hearing is hearsay ; the unspeakable great- 
ness of this IMystery of Life, let him acknowl- 
edge it or not, nay, even though he seem to 
forget it or deny it, is ever present to him, — 
fearful and wonderful, on this hand or on 
that. 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 151 



DECEMBER 22. 

Every day that is born into this world 
comes like a burst of music, and rings itself 
all the day through, and thou shalt make it 
a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as thou 
wilt. 

December 23. 
All speech, even the commonest speech, 
has something of song in it ; not a parish 
in the world but has its parish accent— the 
rhythm or tune to which the people there 
sing what they have to say. Accent is a 
kind of chanting ; all men have accents of 
their own— though they only notice that of 
others. Observe, too, how all passionate 
language does of itself become musical— 
with a finer music than the mere accent ; the 
speech of a man even in zealous anger be- 
comes a chant, a song. All deep things are 
sung. It seems somehow the very central 
essence of us, song ; as if all the rest were 
but wrappage and hulls ! The primal ele- 
ment of us; of us and of all things. 



CAKLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



December 24. 
You must have a man to direct who 
knows well what the duty is that he has to 
do, and who is determined to go through 
that, in spite of all clamor raised against him ; 
and who is not anxious to obtain approba- 
tion, but is satisfied that he will obtain it 
by-and-by, provided that he acts ingenuously 
and faithfully. 

Society, which the more 1 think of it as- 
tonishes me the more, is founded upon Cloth. 

December 25. 
A MAN who will do faithfully, needs to be- 
lieve firmly. If he have to ask at every turn 
the world's suffrage : if he cannot dispense 
with the world's suffrage, and make his own 
suffrage serve, he is a poor eye-servant, the 
work committed to him will be misdone. 



December 26. 
No mortal has a right to wag his tongue, 
much less to wag his pen, without saying 
something ; he knows not what mischief he 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 153 

does, past computation, scattering words 
without meaning, to afflict the whole world 
yet before they cease. 



December 27. 
Tools ? Thou hast no Tools ? Why, 
there is not a man or a thing now alive but 
has tools. The basest of created animal- 
cules, the Spider itself, has a spinning-jenny, 
and a warping-mill, and power-loom within 
its head ; the stupidest of Oysters has a 
Papin's-Digesta, with stone-and-lime house 
to hold it in ; every being that can live can do 
something ; this let him do. — Tools ? hast 
thou not a brain furnished, furnishable with 
some glimmerings of Light, and three fingers 
to hold a pen withal ? Never since Aaron's 
rod went out of practise, or even before it, 
was there such a wonder-working Tool. 



December 28. 

Highest of all Symbols are those wherein 

the artist or poet has risen into Prophet, and 

all men can recognize a present God and 

worship the same. I mean religious Sym- 



54 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 



bols. Various enough have been such re- 
ligious Symbols, what we call Religious ; as 
men stood in this stage of culture or the 
other ; and could worse or better body forth 
the Godlike : some Symbols with a transient 
intrinsic worth ; many with only an extrin- 
sic. If thou ask to what height man has car- 
ried it in this manner, look on our divinest 
Symbol, on Jesus of Nazercth, and His biog- 
raphy, and what followed therefrom. Higher 
has the human thought not yet reached ; 
this is Christianity and Christendom ; a 
Symbol of quite perennial, infinite character 
whose sigr ificance will ever demand to be 
anew inquired into, and anew made manifest. 



December 29. 
Gaze then in the face of thy Brother, in 
those eyes where plays the lambent fire of 
kindness, or in those where rages the lurid 
conflagration of Anger : feel how thy own 
Soul is straightway involuntarily kindled with 
the like, and ye blaze and reverberate in each 
other, till it is all one limitless confluent 



CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 155 



flame (of embracing Love or deadly grap- 
pling Hate) ; and then say what miraculous 
virtue goes out of man into man. But if so, 
through all the thick-piled hulls of the Divine 
Life we speak, and inmost Me is, as it were, 
brought into contact with inmost Me ! 



December 30. 
Generation after generation takes to it- 
self the Form of a Body ; and forth-issuing 
from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission 
appears. What Force and Fire is in each 
he expends ; one grinding in the mill of In- 
dustry ; one hunter-like climbing the giddy 
Alpine heights of Science; one madly 
dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in 
Avar with his fellow ;— and then the Heaven- 
sent is re-called, his earthly vesture falls 
away, and conversion to Sense, becomes a 
vanished Shadow. Thus, like some wild- 
flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's 
artillery, does this mysterious mankind 
thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick-suc- 
ceeding grandeur, through the unknown 



156 CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK. 

Deep. Thus, like a God-created, fire-breath- 
ing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane, 
haste stormfully across the astonished Earth, 
then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's 
mountains are leveled, and her seas filled up, 
in our passage ; can the Earth, which is but 
dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have 
reality and are alive ? On the hardest ada- 
mant some footprint of us is stamped in ; 
the last Rear of the host will read traces of 
the earliest Van. But whence ? O Heaven, 
whither? Sense knows not. Faith knows 
not ; only that it is through Mystery to Mys- 
tery, from God to God. 



December 31. 
Remember now and always that life is no 
idle dream, but a solemn reality and encom- 
passed by eternity. Find out your task : 
stand by it ; the night cometh when no 
man can work. 



DEC 8 1900 



